Eliminationism

If you have the time, please be sure to check out David Neiwert’s ongoing treatment of Eliminationism in America, which is about halfway through its projected ten parts. For most readers the basic plot will hardly come as a surprise, addressing as it such grotesqueries as the European conquest of Mesoamerica, the extermination of North American Indians, and what Ida Wells once called the “red record” of lynching. As the first post indicates, Neiwert is interested in an especially thuggish genealogy of irate, racist nationalism that has expanded in recent years to include new targets.

White frat boys who long to enslave blacks, Texas ranchers who think hunting and shooting a Jew sounds like fun, and radio audiences who want to tattoo Muslims and lock them up in concentration camps — they all reflect the strands of the hard-wired right-wing desire to eliminate, by violent means if necessary, anyone deemed the Other, or the Enemy. . .

It isn’t only Muslims and Jews who are being included in this kind of talk. Probably the leading targets of hateful rhetoric in the past year have been illegal immigrants. But the range of targets is fairly broad, and now includes gays and lesbians; environmentalists; civil-rights advocates; journalists; and the most common target of the past decade, liberals generally. . . .

While it may seem as though this rising drumbeat of eliminationism proceeding from the American right is something new and uniquely dangerous, a look at our history actually reveals that it is something buried deep in our national psyche. It lies dormant in our soil and comes bursting forth when bidden.

I’m usually skeptical of transhistorical claims about the “national psyche,” and I think there are ways that a concept like “eliminationism” attempts to explain too much, but Neiwert is at his best here. The discussion of Apolcalypto in Part III is especially worthwhile.