Sarah Palin's hit list

As much as I dislike Sarah Palin I have to say that she shouldn't be blamed for this. I agree that the whole idea of the map with the targets, and the tweets saying "Don't retreat, instead reaload" are inappropriate and without a doubt stupid, but to blame her for this incident is a tactic by the liberal media to demonize the other side.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm quite liberal myself, but sometimes liberals in the media step down to the level of the right-wing nut jobs of FOX News. Sarah Palin is certainly not the Anti-Christ, but she's truly stupid just like the rest of the Tea Party morons who just happen to be angry at the government but have no strategy whatsoever on how to make things better. They are just bitter ignorant people who want to be in power.

One might also explicitly note that the shootings were in no way related to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, nor even conservatives in general.

user name wrote: One might also explicitly note that the shootings were in no way related to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, nor even conservatives in general.
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You mean, apart from the fact that the shooter was obsessed with the gold standard, the 'totalitarianism' of the (liberal) government and everything else Glenn Beck repeats on a daily basis?

I realize that most Americans, like most Europeans, can't be bothered to look across their own borders, but if you did, you'd notice that an aggressive and virulent brand of nationalism is sweeping Europe and the US, as it often does in the wake of an economic downturn.

People often go round saying (or, more often, screaming) that likening these movements (Tea Party, BNP, PVV, Front National, Vlaams Belang, Popolo della Libertá, etc) to the nazis is not permissible and incorrect. Disregarding for a moment that these people have no problems with likening the Islam or the left to the nazis, they are also quite wrong. The reason for this is that they, like most people, have such poor historical awareness that when they hear "nazi" they immediately think of the Holocaust. NEWSFLASH: the nazis had been in power for nearly *ten years* before they came up with that!

If you compare the NSDAP as it was in 1932, directly before they (quite legally) came to power, to these modern-day reactionary nationalist movements, there are major differences (like the emphasis on paramilitarism), but strikingly, these major differences are characteristic not so much of the nazis and their foreign counterparts as they are of the late 1920s and the 1930s. The clichés about nazis we like to throw around (uncivilized upstarts prancing around in uniforms, strict hierarchy, and the likes) are equally applicable to most if not all political movements of the time. However, when we get down to the core of it, the things that set apart the nazis from other movements of the interbellum are hauntingly familiar:
- an emphasis on political style over political content ('political theatre', powerful leader-figure, use of strong language)
- 11th-hour scaremongering
- obsession with a supposed 'fifth column'
- labelling political opponents traitors of the nation (n.b.) and smearing them
- emphasizing their own values as 'traditional' (often they aren't) and implying that opposing them is unpatriotic
- cultural nationalism (your birth decides who you are: if your parents were Moroccan, you will never be Dutch, French, German, whatever)

The list goes on and on.

Something we all too often forget is that after WWII, there was very little so-called "denazification": many if not most nazi officeholders were left in their places because it was too much of a hassle to get rid of them (to name but one example, fewer than a hundred Dutch policemen were fired after the war, despite the fact that the police and the civil service were the two branches in which most collaboration took place. As late as the end of the 1960s, an absolute majority of the chiefs of police had been members of either the NSDAP or the NSB (Dutch fascist movement)) - many aspects of nazi ideology were allowed to continue (e.g. project Gladio, the anti-communist guerilla in case of a Soviet invasion, supplied neo-fascists and even nazi king pins with funding and weapons), and many nazi's remained in prominent places (well into the 1970s public figures often had to step down upon investigation by the media which uncovered unsavoury ties to the nazis ranging from collaboration to membership of the SS). Nazism is not dead, it has merely taken on a more acceptable guise and toned down its rhetoric.

>>>user name wrote: One might also explicitly note that the shootings were in no way related to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, nor even conservatives in general. <<<<
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The shootings seem to be related to an inept mental health concept and care system in this country (and access to guns, but that's a topic for another thread...). I'd like to say the only good thing that came of this is more dialogue on this very issue. Unfortunately for everyone, there's other news to report and focus on so mental health has already fallen from the headlines.
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However... the shootings called direct attention to the violent references of media noisemakers and political leaders. And, for the record, it wasn't the media who made the initial connection. It was regular people on the streets and in social media forums. It was also Palin's own people who scrubbed the words and graphics from her PAC site within minutes of the shooting. What this shows is an anger and preoccupation with the words and images used by those in positions of power, and a single uh-oh moment by one of same.
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Some of the biggest and most outspoken have called for more civility. Others, including if not especially Palin, have refused to acknowledge how their words, attitudes or graphics relate to the divisive and dangerous mood of the public. To not acknowledge that is to reinforce the sense of superiority and arrogance so often and so well displayed by this irresponsible woman. Whether her rhetoric was a tipping point for the shooting is now irrelevant because she will forever be connected to it in theory when she could have put it all to rest with a proper call for more 'civil' civil discourse.