Malkin revisited

Yesterday's post on Malkin caused quite a storm, and I suppose a follow-up is in order.

Contact information on letterheads and organizational materials used to be considered private. It was legal but not ethical for political opponents to publish that data. At one time, when conservativism was an honorable stance and not a cause for rabid zealotry, all sides knew not to cross that line.

That was then. Things have changed -- and the change was initiated by the right.

Toward the beginning of the current administration, Freepers published private contact information for a restaurant employee who had dared to "card" the Holy and Unassailable Bush Daughters, then underaged. The clear implication was that this individual deserved harrassment and death threats simply because she had dared to inconvenience members of the ruling dynasty.

There were similar incidents -- all from right-wing sites.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

Not long ago, the despicable Ann Coulter revealed the telephone number of Lydia Cornell, a very nice lady with young children. Lydia's household received many death threats from the Freeper Freikorps. Coulter excused her actions in now-familiar terms: Lydia Cornell had revealed her contact info in the body of a letter. In the pre-net days, that practice was considered a standard courtesy, even when political opposites corresponded. Coulter argued that Lydia's willingness to reveal her phone number was tantamount to an invitation to receive calls from any brownshirt who wished to pay the toll charges.

Coulter's message to her mob was clear: Go get 'er! Angry Ann, who considers herself a Christian, has made no secret of the fact that she wants to see a wave of physical intimidation directed against anyone who disagrees with her political stances.

Then Malkin did pretty much the same thing, and offered similar excuses. She did not remove the students' information from her site even when asked to do so.

The pattern is obvious. Coulter was not kidding when she spoke of physical intimidation. Today, it is telephonic death threats. Tomorrow, fires will be set and tires slashed. The next day -- corpses.

There's only one way to stop this pattern from asserting itself again: Fight back. We all remember Sean Connery's words of advice to Kevin Costner in The Untouchables.

After the Lydia Cornell incident, I did not publish Coulter's personal phone number (although I had it), but the Malkin offense was simply infuriating. Those students she targeted for intimidation DID recieve death threats. (By the way, those students are not "anti-troops." Malkin is the one who cares so little for the lives of our soldiers that she would have them placed in harm's way in a war of aggression.)

Furthermore, it is clear that intimidation was Malkin's sole purpose in making those phone numbers available to her reactionary readers. The fact that Malkin found the contact information on organizational materials is irrelevant; her intent is the only factor that matters.

We all know -- and Malkin surely knew -- that rightists make a habit of issuing threats of death and violence. Left-wing writers receive such messages often; right-wing writers rarely do. Why? Because people on the right are sad, sick little creatures attracted to puerile dreams of power and vengeance -- dreams which compensate for being trapped in anonymous lives in which intelligence, creativity or accomplishment play no role.

Threats give way to actual acts. Look and see: Oklahoma City, the Amtrack derailment of 1995, the killing of Matthew Shephard, the murders of Brandon Teena and Gwen Araujo, attacks on abortion clinics, the violent dictatorship planned by the Dominionists. Within an Islamic context, Al Qaeda is a right-wing movement. No matter which theory of 9/11 you prefer, nobody on the left perpetrated that ghastly conspiracy. Nobody on the left was responsible for Jenin. Nobody on the left used white phosphorous on women in Fallujah.

Right-wingers are monsters. Monsters.

If we do not fight back, we will return to the situation which prevailed in Germany in 1920s, when right-wing groups called the Freikorps -- no different in rhetorical style from the Freepers and the militia maniacs -- killed with impunity hundreds of liberals. One night, they would chant in the beer hall: "Death to Walter Rathenau, the godforsaken Jewish sow!" The next night, Rathenau -- a true German patriot -- was murdered. On a later date, the anti-Hitler writer Fritz Gerlich went missing. His wife answered a knock on the door late one night, as a brownshirted thug handed over her husband's eyeglasses. Message delivered.

Over 400 murders of that sort took place in the warm-up to Hitler's takeover.

I predict that this history may repeat itself after a new terror incident. We cannot allow the people who have ruined this country to continue to call us traitors, as they do routinely. They are the ones who have spent our national treasury, indebted us to Arabs and the communist Chinese, sullied our name internationally, lurched our society toward theocracy and initiated a war to steal oil. They are the traitors.

We must break the pattern of intimidation now by standing up to these monsters. Remember, bullies are cowards.

Predictably, they will retreat to what I call the "false underdog" position. Malkin has already issued an "I will not be intimidated" statement, even though she clearly was the one who first decided to use intimidation as a tactic. Let her spew. I don't think she will ever repeat this vile trick. As Connery said in that movie: Thus endeth the lesson.

A young independent British film-maker named Kevin Brownlow once produced (in the 1960s) a film called It Happened Here, which posits what the U.K. might have looked like if Germany won the war. At the end, the protagonist joins the underground. He balks at some of the resistance tactics under discussion. "Won't this make us as bad as them?" he asks.

"Of course it does," answers the leader of the underground. "The appalling thing about Fascism is that it forces you to adopt fascist means to combat it."

I despised that sentiment when I first saw the film, more than twenty years ago. Now, I've reluctantly come to agree.