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Justification by rage alone

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I've written quite a bit how certain groups of people now believe anything is permissible if their cause is just.  War crimes cease to be illicit when used against "orcs" or Nazis. 

It's often associated with Yard Sign Calvinism, but it exists independently of it.  People who would never fall into that category can succumb to it.

I suppose this is a consequence of fading religious sentiment and the secularization of morality.  When you remove God from the equation, it becomes much easier to find loopholes for whatever behavior you desire.

"The cause" is now what matters most, and this is why you see nominally well-educated people excuse deliberate war crimes on the grounds that if the victim doesn't like it, they can just surrender.

I'm calling it "justification by rage alone" because there seems to be a sense that if one's outrage is raised to an extreme level, any resulting violence (or rhetorical excess) is excused.  It's like the famous scene in Forrest Gump where the abusive boyfriend explains that he didn't mean to hit Robin Wright Penn's character, it's "just this war and that bastard Johnson." 

At the time, this was understood to be a lame attempt at deflecting responsibility, but it's now treated as a credible position, particularly within the ruling class.

Combine this with their increasing insularity from both accountability and the plight of those affected by their decisions, and it's hard not to be pessimistic about the future of the country.

 

  1. CN Avatar
    CN

    The idea that all crimes are permitted in the pursuit of a just cause, their cause, is openly championed by antifa. This is per their “handbook” and describes the way their group took its name and developed their tactics, like calling opponents “nazis”. Apparently one of them did some research into the reactions of people watching films and determined that if their were Nazis involved, no level of cruelty and pain associated with their destruction was off limits. In fact, audiences cheered.
    Therefore we are at the “everyone who disagrees with us is hitler”, so we can destroy them. In the case of Trump, “hitler” meant favoring domestic energy production, bringing back some manufacturing to our shores, and having a secure border. The border of course is a particularly hot issue among those who would call others “nazis”. Apparently, there are holocausts going on in Africa, China, and everywhere in Latin America, so to oppose these millions of illegals is pure Nazism of the worst kind. And yes, my husband has been accused of being “just like Hitler” for not favoring open borders. The moronic notion of white Christian nationalism as modern naziism is very popular here, and in this case jews who don’t conform can be hitlers, too.
    Justification by rage alone is only the loud part. Justification by ” never again” is allowing the left to name everyone who they don’t like as nazis under the guise of preemption. How else would a man with Orthodox Jewish grandchildren and who recognized Jerusalem an Israel’s capital be so easily destroyed?
    A lot of blogs are very sensitive about these ideas, IYKWIMAITYD, so to speak.

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  2. A.H. Lloyd Avatar
    A.H. Lloyd

    You’ll forgive for not responding sooner, as I was still working through the concept with some of my friends. They found the notion of college-educated Jews calling each other Nazi’s darkly humorous. It’s schoolyard taunting, and not what one would expect of an Ivy League town.
    I suppose one could also link it with disastrously permissive parenting, where kids are rewarded rather than punished for tantrums and “telling on people” is preferred to kids working their issues out independently. I think a great deal of the anxiety on the left is the fear that the right will install a new “teacher” and a bunch of them are going to finally be held accountable. Or it’s projection – they know what they want to do, and fear others doing the same to them.

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  3. CN Avatar
    CN

    Sadly, it’s exactly what I expect in an Ivy League town. If the adversaries were kids, of let’s say under 40, maybe permissive parenting would explain this, but these are people in their 60s, 70s and 80s hurling the insults and throwing the tantrums. Since 2009, I have seen many long term friendships and close family ties shatter to pieces over loyalty to party, and in my opinion, a deep longing to find the egalitarian utopia, the Age of Aquarius, of their golden youth. They’re pretty damn old now, and it’s now or never.
    Our first experience with this was in 2008. Two of his former friends were volunteering at the Democrat convention in Denver and offered to find us spots on the volunteer roster. They knew we were not Clinton people, but this was Obama, and how could we not support him. So many republicans Brooks and Frum, Charles Fried, and even Arlen Specter had climbed aboard. We declined and the relationship (they went to grade school together) was over for good. The nazi stuff is pure Trump era.
    Seems Dorothy Thompson was correct, after all.

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  4. A.H. Lloyd Avatar
    A.H. Lloyd

    You know these people better than I do, but Dr. Spock’s book came out in 1946, and the academic crowd was always faster to adopt scientific fads. I can very much see progressive, forward thinking parents sparing the rod and those children would be in the age range we are talking about. It’s kind of funny, because my grandparents on both sides were firmly pro-discipline, and it worked out in one family quite well. The other, not so much, and while my parents categorically rejected their parents’ beliefs, I was brought up under relatively severe discipline – of such a nature that I never really tested it that far for fear where it might go. Which was a good thing, actually.
    Pace David Horowitz, the replacement of the temple with the party room is clearly a part of this, and now we’re to the point where the heretics need to be identified and punished. We’ve got Jewish Freemasons, why not Jewish Grand Inquisitors?

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