House of Eratosthenes

Destruction Because of Offense

It is a growing phenomenon, and it was on visible display last week. A group of terrorists was so offended by a publisher that the publisher had to be destroyed publicly as both an act of vengeance and an act of instruction.

The act of vengeance was directed against the publisher directly. He came under attack for his personal actions. He published something that offended the group. He published something that enraged them and, consequently, he needed to be punished.

The punishment could not be minor. It could not be something like heaping scorn on him. It could not be a public disagreement, a challenge or a debate. The subject, after all, is not debatable. The publisher had to be crushed, his livelihood taken, and he had to be ruined.

Ruining him, though, is not enough. There had to be instruction for others. The dictionary defines terrorism as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” One of those political aims is to let others know that if they speak out, they will be ruined, too. The terrorist must teach the public that if any of them causes offense, they too will be taken out. It is more than that, though. It is also instruction to self-regulate against offense.

Once a person has been visibly ruined with no grace and no mercy because, in this example, he dared publish something that offended the terrorists, the lesson is clear. Polite society does not want that violence and cannot abide the violence. So the public will step in, as agents of the terrorist under duress, to shut up any others who might stand in the town square and risk offending.
:
In November of 2013, Kelvin Cochran, a former Obama administration official turned chief of the fire department in Atlanta, Georgia, published a book titled “Who Told You That You Were Naked?” The book expounded on the fire chief’s faith and encouraged people to turn their lives over to Christ.

In the book, Cochran said his chief end was “to glorify God.” He said that was his first duty even in his job at the fire department…
:
…He said gay sex, like heterosexual sex outside of marriage, is a sin. For saying his job was to glorify God and gay sex is a sin, gay rights activists screamed loudly that he could not do his job. They accused Cochran, with no evidence, of proselytizing on the job.

The offended group of activists had to destroy Kelvin Cochran’s livelihood because his published work offended them. Mayor Reed of Atlanta complied.

These people, as Erickson points out, feed off the need of the rest of us to preserve civilized society. We see this over and over again, because it works. One day you say something, next day someone is clamoring for your head — and purely in passive-voice, as in, it isn’t worth remembering or commenting on who exactly is doing this clamoring, how many kindred spirits they represent in their passions, whether they’re even putting their names under something or remaining cowardly anonymous.

The day after that they have your head, and the day after that, someone else’s speech is being compared…again, in passive voice, it doesn’t matter who’s doing it because it seems like everyone is…to the contraband you spoke before your own head fell. It’s “over the line” or “beyond the pale.”

The power to destroy is symbolized in the power to unify without doing any actual unifying. What if the people who wanted to kill that editor in France, got together with the gay activists who managed to take down Kelvin Cochran? They wouldn’t play dosey-doe or give each other high-fives, would they.

J.R. Dunn writes in American Thinker:

American leftism has gotten an awful lot of mileage by monopolizing the moral high ground. It is the sole force in American that favors the poor. The sole enemy of racism. The sole comforter of rape victims. The sole protector of defenseless Muslims. The sole guardian of the environment, and so on ad nauseum.

It all falls apart eventually — with friends like the left, nobody needs enemies. But often overlooked is that fact that it’s bogus from the start. Any prolonged glance at the left reveals it to be an ideology of power, its major tool violence, its goal revenge.

Leftism has always been about revenge. The works of Marx are filled with fantasies of retribution and judgment. Their tone reeks of resentment and paranoia, with blame cast for even the most trivial. “The bourgeoisie,” Marx once declared in a letter to Engels, “will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.” That’s leftism in a nutshell.

When you and I want to send a message, we send it. We act as a force of light, starting with the intention that our audience should know something they previously did not know. This messaging works the opposite way, with a perpetual theme of “Don’t Say That.” The right thing to do is to marginalize it, trivialize it, perhaps study it. That thing in France illustrates vividly that our lives may depend on that someday.

But the more common way to handle it, unfortunately, is to integrate it, and to most emphatically integrate it where we earn our living. Do you work in a place where men have to fear for their jobs if they put a picture of a woman in a swimsuit on their desk or office wall, even if it’s pictures of their wives or girlfriends on vacation? You probably do. Just about everybody does, everyone who works in an office anyway. That’s actually wrong. It’s part of the problem. “I find that offensive…or, I’ve managed to cook up a scenario in which some person, who may or may not exist, could be offended…so you have to go.” That ought to be the way it works in some faraway land, of which we heard from some friend of a friend of a friend, some place we have no intention of visiting even if we want to travel the entire world someday. Should be a work of fiction for all practical intents and purposes, as realistic as Rapunzel offering access to her cloister by way of letting down her long hair.

Once again we see: liberals aren’t. In a truly liberal society, “offense” would be no big deal. We wouldn’t relish it, but it would be a paltry unpleasantness, an unavoidable thing, the price to be paid for living in a place that has freedom. Liberals are quick to make the claim that this is exactly how they feel, ironically, about taxes. But offense? Off with your head. We have all the one-liners memorized. “That might not be cool, know what I’m saying?” “I dunno, do we really need that?” “Someone might complain.”

That’s the real tragedy. Decent people, who genuinely appreciate freedom, live out their entire lives in the light and not in the darkness, become willing dupes of the darkness. We end up having ninety-nine more non-public spectacles, for every public one. That’s why there is the destruction. As Erickson points out, the destruction is not the point, it is merely a tactic. The point to it is the public spectacle, the message to be sent to everyone else. The publisher who is shot, or the prisoner who is beheaded, or the guy who said something wrong or displayed something wrong and has to be forced into administrative leave or early retirement; these are just ways to get that done. Gay activists, Islamic extremists, frumpy women who don’t want any pictures of girls in bikinis around, they all just want to open a can of whoopass…but to do that, you have to open and wreck at least one can.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

DarknessSaturday, January 24th, 2015

Darkness
Saturday, January 24th, 2015