The Tragedy and Farce of Collective Guilt

William N. Grigg

Pro Libertate
June 13, 2009



Dark Helmet, evil ruler of the Spaceballs: Before you die, Lone Star, there is something you should know about us.

Lone Star, intrepid if thick-headed space hero: What?

Dark Helmet (with triumphant menace): I … am your father’s, brother’s, nephew’s, cousin’s former roommate.

Lone Star (puzzled): What’s that make us?

Dark Helmet (after a beat): Absolutely nothing.

From the climactic battle sequence in Mel Brooks’ 1987 satirical space epic, Spaceballs.

The tenuous, gossamer link of distant association described by Dark Helmet works as a piece of throw-away satirical comedy. Under the doctrine of collective guilt being promoted by our would-be cultural commissars, that relationship would also be sufficient to serve as a “ink” connecting Lone Star to the crimes committed by Dark Helmet.

	Partisan hack and hypocritical ideologue: During the reign of Bush the Lesser, Keith Olbermann routinely — and properly — condemned the Regime for inflating the threat of Islamic terrorism. Now he’s leading the chorus of alarm regarding the supposed threat of domestic “right-wing” terrorism.

Lest it be thought that I’m exaggerating, consider Keith Olbermann’s effort to connect Ron Paul — a man devoted to peace and protecting the individual rights of everybody, a man who seems biologically incapable of malice — to James von Brunn, the troubled 88-year-old man accused of carrying out the murderous shooting rampage at the Holocaust Museum.

Olbermann, who looks like one of Eugene Levy’s SCTV caricatures and (to my disappointment) appears to have the soul of an East German prosecutor, grimly informed his viewing audience that “von Brunn switched his website domain on May 1 to a man who shares a phone number with a woman who was listed as the Michigan coordinator for former presidential candidate Ron Paul.”

What does that make the actual relationship between von Brunn and Dr. Paul?

As Dark Helmet would say: Absolutely nothing.

But this is a “link,” or at least can be forged into one by people whose reserves of silliness and dishonesty are adequate to that task, and Olbermann — who, like most pathologically self-important asses, has an apparently bottomless supply of silliness — easily qualifies.

A theory of collective guilt easily as silly as Olbermann’s dribbled down the chin — or at least oozed from the fingertips — of David Neiwert, a former professional associate of the degenerate fraud and racial ambulance chaser Morris Dees.

Niewert is author of the recent book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. For the most part a porridge of self-contradictory partisan talking points, Neiwert’s book does offer the occasional useful disclosure.

For example, Neiwert points out (pg. 126) that during its revival in the early decades of the 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan acted as “an auxiliary police outfit” to enforce laws against bootlegging — which is to say that the Klan acted as government sub-contractors in carrying out the deranged policy of Prohibition. There’s a potent seed of an important realization here regarding the role of the state in cultivating hate groups. Regrettably, that seed requires fertile soil in which to flourish, and where such uncomfortable thoughts are concerned, Neiwert’s mind is barren and rocky ground.

Similarly, Neiwert provides a well-researched and detailed chapter on “Eliminationism in America” (no, it’s not devoted to matters of digestive tract health) which deals with the long and tragic history of the State’s war against the Indians, as well as other forms of State-enforced racial discrimination.

In that survey the author takes due notice of the depredations carried out against the Plains Indians by Union “war heroes” like Phil Sheridan and William Sherman. He then he spends the rest of the book excoriating “neo-Confederates.” That category presumably includes anyone who recalls with horror the eliminationist campaigns against the Shenandoah Valley and civilian populations in Georgia as a prelude to the crimes committed against the Indians.

Read all of it.