More Politics, Immigration, and My Overwhelming Disgust for Liberals

Seeing as how my Plan seems to be back on to the format of "real" issues, and as this is not completely unrelated to the on-going gentrification discussion, and as I'm not sure that most people are aware, I thought I would discuss the controversal Columbia University Minuteman protest.

So Columbia's conservative group brought some Gilchrist guy, the leader of the Minutemen Project, to speak at Columbia a week or so ago. The Minutemen are paramilitaries who stand on the border in Texas with guns to "protect" land and america in general from immigrants crossing the border. Much to my, and I think most people's suprise, the protest managed to rush the stage and shut down the talk. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can watch it for yourself here.

Then, much to my complete lack of suprise, this spontaneous action completely out of character for our era on the part of the students was characterized as "liberal student fascism" not only by the media, but by many students who are against the Minutemen. You can read one typical editorial in Columbia's Spectator here.

I also hear that our good friend Bill O'Reilly had some pretty choice remarks for the Columbia students as well. I'm not going to repost them here, you could find them easily enough if you want.

The thing that absolutely infuriates me, and is one of the primary reasons I believe "politics" as actionable arena is currently impossible (on the national scene, that is), is the response of the liberals. Just as the guy they are there to disagree with is forced to shut up, they forget what the issue is. All of a sudden the issue has become "Free Speech". The immigrants are forgotten--now merely a footnote--to the real issue of trying to preserve the senseless duality of american liberal politics.

Despite the current "liberal arts" education's continued focus on the power of words and discourse, the insistence upon the ability of a force of speech to be "hateful", or to carry with it the weight of racist, classist, or other exploitative power, the "liberal" political set seems unable to understand the true relationship between political force and discourse. In fact, they seem determined to define their political position by placing themselves in the very dead zone where words have no meaning and there is little, and if any, incidental, opportunities for progressing from discourse to actual political consequences.*

Free speech is, currently in our era, a general ideal that in the free-play of discourse and rational discussion the "good, fair, and universal" ideas will rise to the top, and the "emotional, prejudiced, and hateful" thoughts will be dismissed. Somehow the phrasing of the general protection of the right to speak from the interference of the government as codified in a 200-some year-old document, which we ever so cutely refer to as the Constitution (note the capital "C") has convinced us that as parties to the social contract of society we each have become a state unto ourselves and are there for responsible for protecting every individual's right to speak, if not out of categorical "duty" (fuck the 2nd critique, waht waht) then out of some pragmatic understanding of karma whereby our protection of other's speech will cause them to protect our own down the road, or out of some apocalyptic fear of progressing down the burning road to the hell of communism/fascism which will no doubt be the end result of prevented speech. My allusions to religion here are not idle, nor are they polemic.

However, what is forgotten, as is all too often, is that unfortunately ideas like this are bred in cloistered, protected, "free" domains (call them towers if you want, my school is in a converted department store) and therefore such ideas will tend to have little practical (or in this case, political) relevance to the "real world of everyday life" etc etc etc.

I think, as "fascism" has already been invoked, that it wouldn't be a bad example to turn towards for explication of the complexities of speech and politics. We all know it's one of my favorite, too. So, we all know (don't we?) that one of the generally agreed upon (by the academics who know such things) fundamentals of fascism is the authoritarian control of speech and discourse. And more locally, we have images in our minds of brown-shirted Nazi thugs breaking up the meetings of the social democrats (such a wonderful name for a political party, is is not?), smashing their presses, and taking the billy club to teachers in the streets. This is the point of comparison for all those who are calling the students who broke up the talk with their protest "fascist".

But how were the Nazis able to accomplish this? They were allowed to! The social democrats had insufficient organization that wasn't able to counter the thugs. The communists fought back, fighting for their streets and neighborhoods with their lives. But they were eventually defeated, because the Nazis had the implicit (if not explicit) backing of the state apparatus and the police. Never forget that Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht were murdered at the hands of the army and paramilitaries working hand in hand under the orders of a trade-union Social Democrat! This event at the beginning of the Weimar Constitution (there's that magic word again) would prove emblematic for the German governments commitment to politics; nationalistic politics were allowed a free reign, anyone else was forced to fight up hill for their lives, if not for the liberation of the political scene.

It is exactly the sort of bungling, misunderstood, weak-kneed conception of politics that the Social Democrats had that we now see in american liberal politics. The idea of conflict sickens liberals, and they opt for the path of least resistance. Hitler was given the chancellorship as a means to "calming down" the political scene, by bringing him to the "table" of a cabinet with Social Democrats they hoped to control him. Because they opened the door, he walked in. I'll spare you the history lesson, but I would ask that you compare it to our current events. I believe that we are lucky that this country is already filled with immigrants, and the nationalists will only decrease further into the minority. Because these racists are of the same fabric of the opponents to the civil rights movements 40 years ago. If the demographics hadn't changed, we would still be in the days of the zoot suit riots and church burnings, because these fucks haven't changed their tune, they've only been more and more outnumbered. And the liberals continue to allow this tripe to be fed to the waiting mouths of their friends, not dissuaded from "just a taste" for themselves, either.

Speech is one thing, but it is linked to power. When a person gets on stage to discursively justify his/her actions, his actions and speech are intimately linked. There is not such thing as an open-forum were ideas may be shared, and political associations evaporate. When Gilchrist appeared on the stage under the banner of his organization he may as well have been holding a gun to the face of a person. When he was given a microphone so his opinions could be amplified, he might as well have been handed a box of bullets. When Columbia security prosecutes the students for attempting to stop him, they might as well have chambered a round in his rifle and helped to steady his aim.

Politics can occur only when one acts, in speech one only prepares to act. You can argue against the nationalists until you are blue in the face. You might even shake hands with a nationalist afterwards, and say it was a "good debate". And then afterward, once s/he gets in the car and drives away, you can rest easy, knowing your position was defended. But what about the nationalist? Right back to the border, with gun in hand. Or worse, to the next talk, to win more supporters, to romance more students that need a cause, to send more people with guns out to do whatever guns are meant for.

I say, Fuck That. Is free speech worth anything to the people who can't afford a chair in the classroom? Or the people who can't get close to a classroom? Or the people who are dead? You, Liberal, can hold all the opinions that you want. I will hardly coerce anyone into changing their beliefs. But I refuse to augment my belief in the right of people to exist because you have some moral compunction, some "damn spot" on your shining white ideal of free speech. If speech is the common denomenator, the act of expression of human life, how can you attempt to defend that expression in the face of the lack of concern for that life?

The way you can, Liberal, is because you have turned the facts of exploitation into an issue. You have reduced the struggle of humanity against the forces within itself that would destroy it into a mere fairy tale: an idealistic dream, a round table, and a banner. There is no compromise with hatred, or with exploitation of human life. It is not "if you are not with us you are against us," you misunderstand. They don't care if you are with them or not. All they want is to use your microphone, and if they convince one person in a room of one hundred, then they have won. The other 99 they couldn't care about if they don't stand in their way.

That is why the nationalists got so pissed off over Columbia. This is the real danger to them, that the David Horowitz's, the Michael Savage's, the O'Reilly's, might not be able to hide behind liberals own political confusion any longer. Those kids on the stage at Columbia, although they might not have known it, charged the gleaming wall and found it was all an apparition, and easily stepped through. The hippies found that out on Oct. 21, 1967, but that wave broke on the steps of the Pentagon. It is so easy to tell these idiots to fuck off, yet no one wants to raise the finger. And until they do, the idiots will proceed unperturbed. They always have and they always will.

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* It is ironic, of course, that I phrase this condemnation in the form of an essay. However, I have attempted to make this argument in person to the Columbia students and other liberals I know, so at least in this way I hope that these thoughts articulated in discourse might change or shift the mental states and subjective discursive patterns that allow the cesspool of political thought to continue to stagnate. And who knows, someone might even think twice about their liberal position after reading this.