Words Matter – Eliminationism in the United States

[Time for change]

I tell people don’t kill all the liberals – Leave enough so that we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so that we will never forget what these people stood for – Rush Limbaugh


With the ratcheting up hate rhetoric by assorted right wing fanatics in recent months and years, Americans should take very seriously the threat that this poses. David Neiwert calls this phenomenon “eliminationism”, which he discusses thoroughly in his book, “The Eliminationists – How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right”. In the introduction to his book he describes the phenomenon:

What motivates this kind of talk and behavior is called eliminationism: a politics and a culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.

Rhetorically, eliminationism… depicts its opposition as beyond the pale, the embodiment of evil itself, unfit for participating in their vision of society, and thus worthy of elimination. It often further depicts its designated Enemy as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and disease-like cancers on the body politic. A close corollary is the claim that opponents are traitors or criminals and that they pose a threat to our national security… Eliminationism is often voiced as crude “jokes”… predicated on venomous hatred.

Neiwart makes a parallel to a well known type of historical movement. Speaking of the tendency of eliminationist rhetoric to be translated into action, he says:

This is where the specter of fascism raises its head on American soil. Eliminationism has always been a signature trait of fascism… As we shall see, it has a long history in America… it almost always raises the red flag of incipient fascism.

Yet it is almost always couched in more benign terms by its practitioners:

The proponents of Indian genocide in the old West couched their violent intentions in words like “protecting civilization”. The advocates of lynching and Klan terror always cloaked their vicious murderousness in the guise of “the defense of traditional values”… For the Nazis, the Holocaust was ostensibly all about the “racial health” of the body politic…

Ominously, eliminationism has the potential to spread throughout society:

It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. We have the historical example of 20th century fascism as a reminder. The Nazis… didn’t get that way overnight. Eliminationism is an acute warning sign: it has historically played the role of creating permission for people to act out their violent impulses… And we dare not ignore the warning.

A brief history of eliminationism in the United States

Those who don’t believe that eliminationism lacks the potential to pose a major threat of violence in the United States should consider our history.

The slaughter of Native Americans
It is estimated that when Columbus came to America in 1492, the native population of North America was about 20 million. Within one or two centuries, that number was reduced by about 95%. Neiwert discusses their treatment by the United States of America:

In 1832, Indian removal began to be carried out in earnest. The result, as removal critics warned, was the effective extinction of numerous tribes, as well as hundreds and even thousands of deaths in every relocation effort. The culmination of these efforts was the notorious Trail of Tears in 1838, in which the Cherokee Nation – some 17,000 people – was forcibly relocated… Something between 2,000 and 8,000 people died on the Trail of Tears.

And always these spasms of eliminationist violence were preceded by eliminationist rhetoric. Before there was action, there was talk. And the talk not only rationalized the violence that proceeded, but actually had the function of creating permission for it.

The treatment of our former slaves
During our long history of slavery, American rhetoric concerning black slaves dehumanized them in order to justify their harsh treatment for the economic benefit of their owners. During this period of time, however, there was little if any talk of elimination, since they provided a valuable service. Neiwert describes the change that occurred following their emancipation:

Once emancipated, they came to be seen as a real threat to whites, and particularly to whites’ dominant economic and cultural status. Their change of perception became immediately manifest, during Reconstruction, when black freedmen were subjected to a litany of attacks at the hands of their former owners, attacks that went wholly unpunished… In 1866, the violence became discernibly more organized with the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan… and spread like wildfire throughout the South… culminating in a steady stream of Klan lynchings between 1868 and 1871… At least one study puts the number at 20,000 blacks killed by the Klan in that period. In the ensuing years, the violence increased, despite the Klan’s official banishment.

Past imperialist wars
President McKinley, convinced by American businessmen to attempt to colonize the Philippines, attempted to justify that occupation prior to his invasion of the Philippines in 1899:

We could not leave them to themselves – they were unfit for self-government – and they would soon have anarchy and misrule… there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them… blah blah blah.

Some might think that this statement doesn’t sound so ominous. But the point is that by publicly making the arrogant and baseless assumption that the Filipinos were “unfit for self-government”, our President set the stage for a series of American atrocities there.

A vicious guerilla war ensued, lasting three and a half years, from February 1899 until the middle of 1902. It was characterized by widespread torture, rape, pillage, and the frequent refusal of the American military to make a distinction between civilians and the Filipino military. By the time that the U.S. had “pacified” the Philippines, the dead included 4,374 American soldiers, 16 thousand Filipino guerillas, and 20 thousand Filipino civilians.

A report in the Philadelphia Ledger in 1901 gave the American people their first glimpse of the atrocities committed during the American-Philippine War:

Our men have been relentless; have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog… Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to “make them talk,” have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later… shot them down one by one…

The Mai Lai massacre during the Vietnam War is the most well known atrocity of that war, though it was only the tip of the iceberg. Here is a brief summary of it:

When Charlie Company entered Mai Lai they encountered no resistance from Viet Cong Soldiers, yet three hours later there were over 500 civilian Vietnamese, men, women and children, dead. Lieutenant William Calley, for whatever reason, ordered his men to kill, burn and destroy everything in the village….

The Iraq War and occupation
Lest Americans think that our history of genocidal racism is all in the past, they should consider, among many other things, the testimony of Iraqi veterans about that war. As described by Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd in their book, “Rules of Disengagement”:

Veterans spoke about shootings and beatings of children and other innocent civilians as well as the torture of prisoners…. Ian J. Lavalle reported, “We dehumanized people. The way we spoke about them, the way we destroyed their livelihoods, their families, doing raids, manhandling them, throwing the men on the ground while their family was crying…”

An article in The Nation, titled “Winter Soldiers Speak”, written by Laila Al-Arian, was written from statements by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) at the March 2008 Winter Soldier summit in Silver Spring, Maryland:

Pfc. Clifton Hicks was given an order. Abu Ghraib had become a "free-fire zone," Hicks was told, and no "friendlies" or civilians remained in the area. "Game on. All weapons free," his captain said. Upon that command, Hicks's unit opened a furious fusillade, firing at people scurrying for cover, at anything that moved. Sent in to survey the damage, Hicks found the area littered with human corpses, including women and children, but he saw no military gear or weapons of any kind near the bodies. In the aftermath of the massacre, Hicks was told that his unit had killed 700-800 "enemy combatants." But he knew the dead were not terrorists or insurgents; they were innocent Iraqis. "I will agree to swear to that till the day I die," he said. "I didn't see one enemy on that operation."

Soldiers and marines at Winter Soldier described the frustration of routinely raiding the wrong homes and arresting the wrong people… "This is not an isolated incident," the testifiers uttered over and over… insisting that the atrocities they committed or witnessed were common….

While the Winter Soldiers offered a searing critique of the military's treatment of civilians, which they described as alternately inhumane and sadistic, they also empathized with fellow soldiers thrust into a chaotic urban theater where the lines between combatants and civilians are blurred. "It's criminal to put such patriotic Americans...in a situation where their morals are at odds with their survival instincts"…

Current eliminationist threat in the United States

Many Americans considered the evidence of Barack Obama’s election to the U.S. Presidency as evidence that our country had entered a so-called “post-racial” era. In some respects that is true. It certainly showed that many tens of millions of Americans had gotten beyond the crude racism of our earlier history.

But on the other hand, that election stirred up intense violent feelings in a sizable minority of our population. President Obama receives about 30 death threats a day, a large proportion of them overtly racially tinged, representing a 400% increase over death threats received by his predecessor, and a higher rate than for any previous U.S. president. Worse yet, there is evidence of increasing racially motivated violence against African-Americans in our country. And shortly before Election Day 2008, law enforcement officers uncovered and stopped a plot to kill Obama, in addition to 102 additional black people in our country.

Ominously, it is even beginning to become acceptable in some circles to publicly advocate murder:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office… Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

It seems to me that these people are coming perilously close to stepping over the line of their First Amendment protections of free speech. I don’t recall our First Amendment being legally used as an excuse to advocate murder – and of a U.S. President yet!

Anger over immigration has resulted in eliminationist rhetoric and actions against Hispanic immigrants. Neiwert describes this phenomenon:

We’ve been seeing an increase in hate crimes against Latino immigrants… many of which go unreported because the victims fear deportation if they go to the police. Again we see the nature of the eliminationist beast: it begins with rhetoric, then becomes endorsed by officialdom, a combination that gives permission for action. When right-wing pundits bandy this kind of talk, they’re giving their tacit approval to violence, and voice to the darkest side of the American psyche.

Among other incidents, the shooting deaths of two members of the Universalist/Unitarian Church, in the church, indicate that liberals have also become a target of right wing eliminationist rhetoric, rage and action. Jim Atkisson would have killed dozens more had he not been stopped by some courageous church members. The letter that he wrote to justify his murders demonstrates his eliminationist intentions:

Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them.... Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House… I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people.

The roots of eliminationist rhetoric and behavior

Ascertaining the causes of this phenomenon is not a simple matter. After reading dozens of books about Hitler and his Holocaust, I could never figure out whether he was motivated primarily by political opportunism or by actual hatred of his victims. More likely it was a combination of the two. Probably his ravenous desire for power was the major factor. But then, he had to find a way to justify his evil actions. So he convinced himself that his victims were subhuman and deserved their fate. A similar combination of motivations probably explains the actions of most of the monstrous tyrants of history.

Wherever you see genocide it is a good bet that the genocidal architects are motivated by a host of economic and political factors. There is usually at least a small group of people who benefit enormously from the wars that they help to instigate. Eliminationist rhetoric, including dehumanization of the purported enemy, often helps to set the stage for these wars and make them politically feasible.

Those are the leaders, the nation’s elites. But there are always orders of magnitude more followers than leaders. What about their motivation? In his book, “The Authoritarians” (which I discuss in this post), Bob Altemeyer describes in great detail the phenomenon of excessive obedience to authority. Based on his own research, the obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram, and historical and sociological literature on the subject, he explains:

The bigger reason has to be that the vast majority of us have had practically no training in our lifetimes in openly defying authority. The authorities who brought us up mysteriously forgot to teach that. We may desperately want to say no, but that turns out to be a huge step that most people find impossibly huge – even when the authority is only a psychologist you never heard of running an insane experiment. From our earliest days we are told disobedience is a sin, and obedience is a virtue, the “right” thing to do…

We as individuals are poorly prepared for a confrontation with evil authority, and some people are especially inclined to submit to such authority and attack in its name.

The humanist psychiatrist Erich Fromm, in his book, “The Sane Society”, (which H2O Man recommended to me), the humanist psychologist Erich Fromm explains the phenomenon of excessive obedience to authority as originating as an unhealthy response to the human need for rootedness and a sense of identity:

Man – freed from the traditional bonds… afraid of the new freedom which transformed him into an isolated atom – escaped into (a state) of which nationalism and racism are the two most evident expressions… Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism are the most drastic manifestations of this (Fromm wrote this in 1955)…The average man today obtains his sense of identity from his belonging to a nation… Those who are not “familiar” by bonds of blood… are looked upon with suspicion, and paranoid delusions about them can spring up at the slightest provocation.

Some closing words on eliminationism

So it is that society’s elites cast a spell over millions of their fellow countrymen, in order to facilitate their sociopathic quest for wealth and power. It’s bad enough that this leads us into repeated catastrophic imperialist wars. It is even worse when it additionally poses the risk of widespread violence on our own soil.

Fromm explains what this does to individual people who succumb to the diseases of racism and ultra-nationalism:

His capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their – and his own – human reality. Nationalism is our … idolatry, our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by “patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation…

Near the end of his book, Neiwert makes a statement about what we currently need to deal with:

Confronting the legacy of eliminationism is necessary for our wellbeing as a nation… Healing those fault lines takes work. To do so, ultimately, entails not simply standing up to the outrageous falsehoods and the cold inhumanity its purveyors spew but also creating a culture in which engaging our common humanity informs our choices, our behavior, our beliefs, our politics. It also entails looking honestly at our history and understanding how we came to be where we are today – seeing that although today the virus of eliminationism is far more hidden, it remains buried in our cultural soil, and invariably surfaces when we look the other way.