GLENN BECK’S HAMMER Political Life
People who are ideologues do not use language to explore truths, they use it as a hammer to hammer their opponents, with the fruitless wish that it will drive the last nail in their coffin.
Glenn Beck’s word-savagery has gone over the top – after his one day off for a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in which he made vague calls to common human values which he himself equated to those of Dr Martin Luther King. This seems to have been too much repression of the fire in Beck’s belly, for within a week he went back to his oft repeated tirades against Christians who want to improve the lot of the poor and disenfranchised "Nazi's."
This time he claimed that their approach will lead to "mass death," referring especially to his bête noir, minister and leader of Sojourners, Jim Wallis. His words do a disservice to those people who really suffered under the Nazis. It diminishes the horrors of the SA, the SS, the Gestapo who claimed to represent great national traditions, while serving major corporations like IG Farben, Porsche, Krupp with war profits and slave labor . They were pro-corporate exploiters of the worst sort – even before they unleashed their murderous hatred upon Jews, gypsies and others. He is in effect, calling the Nazis “social justice Christians” (and vice versa of course) in rants that could provide us with a Saturday Night live sketch unedited. Beck forgets that those who believed in social justice went to the first concentration camps, to prepare the ground before the "final solution" was put in place. Silence from those who believed in social justice and civil rights was absolutely necessary to move on to the most massive genocide in history.
This crass propaganda exploits the suffering of the tens of millions of innocents in World War II to vilify those whose consciences are moved to do good. What is the source of the astonishing hatred Beck projects onto “social justice Christians?” There can be only one answer – from within himself. I can not speak to the particular hell Glenn Beck lives in, but one can only attribute hatred of people who assiduously avoid the language of hate and acts of anger (like Jim Wallis and the evangelical Christians of Sojourners) to a source within the man. Beck thinks he has the cure for what ails American society. I do not think most people will agree the cure is to do away with those who preach compassion. If he wants to see a cure, this is clearly a case of “physician heal thyself.” Here we have a man with the country's most powerful "pulpit" built by Rupert Murdoch, buttressed by the massive resources of FOX News, desecrating the memories of millions by calling those people who think first of the disenfranchised in our society, in smearing them with the name of the movement (a right wing one to boot) that many regard as the agents of the worst evil the twentieth century produced. If Beck went back to the comparatively mild-mannered Reagan era, and simply attacked his perceived enemies with the sarcastic catch-phrases like "liberal do-gooders" and “bleeding-heart Liberals” that would be a step forward. At least this wouldn't be hate speech. However, hate speech is precisely the fare that Glenn Beck and FOX are serving up now.
Jim Wallis is advocating "mass death?" Is there no sane member on the FOX board? We need conservative broadcasting to get all views across, but this is florid paranoia. FOX is pushing Beck forward to whip up paranoia among its many viewers, after the "objective and fair" commentators (as they call them) put the batter in the bowl for their master propaganda chef, Mr B to whip. He is more outrageous than the once "serious" media revelations of black helicopters, that we now laugh at. If FOX has no minute sense of responsibility, one day we will look back and laugh: "Remember Fox," we shall say. "They had that fuzzy headed man who said Christians who believe in social justice were advocating mass killing." We shall laugh, and then hopefully turn on either our responsible progressive or conservative TV networks, and settle in to listen to balanced people make genuine attempts to dispense and analyze real events.
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