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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Events Prove The Power Of Words

Anthony Lewis New York Times

When the courts held that American Nazis had a constitutional right to march through the streets of Skokie, Ill., freedom of speech was the more secure for all of us. But it did not follow that we should be indifferent to the hateful message of the Nazis. To the contrary.

The First Amendment gives us responsibility along with freedom: the responsibility to answer propagators of hate. As Justice Brandeis put it, arguing against the suppression of bad speech, “The fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”

The Oklahoma City bombing has made us think again about hateful speech and how to deal with it. The country has learned a good deal about the paranoid ravings of “militia” groups and such radio spokesmen as Mark Koernke of Michigan. (“Death to the new world order!”) G. Gordon Liddy has defended as perfectly reasonable his radio advice on how to kill federal agents if they come at you. (“Shoot twice to the body, center of mass.”)

Few other societies, even the most democratic, would permit such murderous talk. We do, and we should not change, but we ought to worry about it.

The more interesting question is the responsibility not of the crazies but of major leaders of opinion for the consequences of their angry words. Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh bristled at the suggestion that their rhetoric had something to do with Oklahoma City, and of course it did not in any direct sense. But what about the climate that their words helped to create?

Over many years now right-wing politicians have demonized their opponents as un-American, treasonous, peculiar. The tactic was invented by Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. An example of its recent use was Gingrich’s statement just before the election last fall that Democrats are “the enemy of normal Americans.”

Anyone who thinks such words have had no effect is ignorant of political history. Even more significant lately has been the demonization of the federal government. The drumbeat of right-wing rhetoric in the last few years has been Washington as the enemy, the inhuman monster. Has that no connection with the rise of groups that claim federal agents are about to descend on them in black helicopters? (A new member of the House, Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, has actually parroted those lunatic claims.)

Or think about the anti-abortion fanatics. They preach that every abortion is murder. Yet when some enthusiast for that view actually executes a doctor as a murderer, the preachers disavow responsibility.

Abortion is not some trivial issue. Attacks on clinics and doctors are a dangerous phenomenon in this country - and in no other. The Christian Coalition and other extreme opponents of abortion have such a stranglehold on the Republican Party that Sen. Bob Dole feels he has to please them by keeping the nomination of Dr. Henry Foster as surgeon general off the floor of the Senate.

Pat Robertson, leader of the Christian Coalition, is very likely the country’s most effective demagogue. He tells his followers that a satanic conspiracy started centuries ago by European bankers (with Jewish names) was behind Lincoln’s assassination and is now trying to crush Americans under a “new world order.” Do those words have no consequences?

Rush Limbaugh thinks it is cute to refer to people with whose views he disagrees as “feminazis.” In a climate of calculated hate for The Other, how can we expect to have the civil discourse that is the mechanism of Madisonian democracy?

The underlying premise of so much right-wing

rhetoric here is that America has been undermined, subverted, ruined. And people believe it. When Richard L. Berke of The New York Times talked to voters last fall, many said things were terrible here; some said they couldn’t stand it and were going to emigrate. What country were they talking about?

We cherish freedom of speech. But we can defend that freedom and still hold accountable leaders who play on fear and hatred. Words matter.