Thread: Terrorist
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Old 07-21-2005, 06:40 AM   #31 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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the collapse into paroxym above--that is hate speech harumph harumph...treason harumph harumph....just absurd.
attempts to shut down debate, nothing more.

here is a definition of hate speech:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech

you can see in it indications of the running tension between accusations of hate speech and problems of censorship.
in this case, the accusation thrown about by ustwo is so wholly without foundation that one can really only interpret it as an attempt to effectively censor the debate by trying to have it shut down. unless ustwo views himself as being victimized by red4ever's post--in which case i woudl have to step past the boundaries i draw for myself in playing the tfp game and speculate about psychological state--which i cannot do (no information)

the treason tack is more typical--in the hands of the right, this term effectively applies to anyone who disagrees with conservative positions on questions that pertain to the military in the broadest possible sense it has all the semantic range and potentially the dangers of the notion of the hitlero-trotskyite wrecker in stalin's "short course"---which was the principal signifier deployed to designate the principle of everything that can go wrong in an otherwise uniform and perfect order (like the fiction of hayek-style market capitalism in america would be for the right, or within the fantasy of a monolithically conservative american "nation")--and to legitimate the purging of these elements.

this kind of irrational namecalling is an index of the really authoritarian side of conservative politics--absolute intolerance of those who disagree, absolute refusal to consider information that falls outside what the right is told is the legitimate way of thinking---the ease with which the right collapses back onto hysteria, given certain triggers, and the more or less inevitable intertwining of this hysteria with a discourse of violence....within this you can see--clearly--the affect structure that right ideology mobilizes and structures--fear and hatred of that which is other, that which is not conservative---which in turn opens onto the centrality of the group hate (in orwell's terms) in structuring a conservative sense of community--which in turn opens onto the discursive function of the category "terrorist"--the undefined and undefinable phantom Enemy and its correlate in the fifth column.

it is not rocket science to see this fear and hatred of that which is outside the boundary that distinguishes conservativeland from its enemies a displacement of anxiety about social and economic instability. if capitalism is an unqualified good, but the effects of this type of capitalism is the rapid undermining of the types of social position that folk think themselves and their place in the world through, then displacement or sublimation are the only alternatives. and that is the way right ideology has chosen to go over the past 15 years. and in this one can see the gap that seperates this populist right ideology from older types of conservatism, which were largely based on a defense of a social order understood as stable in itself mounted largely by or in the interest of those who materially benefitted from that order.
this is a different space, contemporary populist right ideology.
for older school conservatism--which was capable of great brutality--fear was generated by violation of hierarchy--the "unwashed" were forgetting "their place" and had to be stopped.
in populist right ideology these days, the fear is much less directed.

it is not always the case that discourses structured in this manner result in the kind of violence that one associates with radical right discourse historically. but it is the case that discourses structured in this manner create the possiblity of such violence by making it very very easy to see those who fall outside the community as evil, as less than, as traitors, as persecutors. particularly if you couple these patterns of discourse with ideologically generated problems with self-reflexivity.
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