It’s just never appropriate, is it?
Let’s take the two Canadian “free speech advocates” pictured above, Marc Lemire and Paul Fromm, as a case in point.
I may have spoken too quickly about these gentlemen. But the kindly white folks over at Free Dominion have turned me around.
Look, we’ve been exposed for days now to the intriguing use of the word “racist” being bandied about by the Right in reference to the Trayvon Martin case.
Apparently it’s “racist” to speak out against all-pervasive presence of racism in American society. It’s “racist” to want justice for kid stalked and killed by a white vigilante. It’s “racist” to cover the Martin case if you’re a person of colour—the crime, it would seem, of broadcasting while Black. It’s “racist” to reach out to the bereaved Martin family, as one human being to another. It’s “racist” to note the almost unanimous right-wing view that Martin was the guilty one, a typical (insert racist stereotypes and slurs here—this one’s inventive).
The word “racist,” in other words, has been appropriated by those we’ve been calling racists ourselves, as an insult for progressives. It’s white hoods vs. Black hoodies, with the racists in the latter corner. So we racists will have to think up a new, printable signifier for the braying members of the ex post facto lynch mob presently busy trying to assassinate Trayvon Martin’s character.
In the meantime, I’m determined to be post-racial today, so I thought I’d take a look at that other n-word, without incurring the wrath of Godwin—but just to show once again how words can get all bent out of shape.
Nazis? The two fellows I mentioned above are just crusaders for free speech. The fact that they post on a site like Stormfront makes no never-mind. Fox News, after all, is supportive of Stormfront—heck, some of its staffers are even members.
It’s all good mainstream stuff.
As I said, I’ve been unkind enough to have a go at these guys in the past, using the n-word and all. But here are the counter-arguments, and mark them well, as I have.
Marc Lemire posts on Stormfront, but so what? “White power” boards had all the good information long before Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. And Lemire never said anything explicitly racist on that “white power” site. Besides, Stormfront really isn’t all that bad, you know?
Lemire has absolutely nothing to do with the Heritage Front. Well, he might have had some youthful indiscretions, but he hasn’t put a foot wrong for years. He was certainly never the president of it. OK, even if he was, the Heritage Front wasn’t Nazi anyway.
(Whoops. Oh, well, there’s no doubt a good explanation.)
Swastikas? Hey, they’re just an East Indian goodluck charm!
As for Paul Fromm, nothing wrong with him either says a Free Dominion regular.
He certainly attends all the good parties:
This latest, from Gawker magazine, on the occasion of a sparsely attended meeting of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, is a keeper:
Next up was Paul Fromm, a red-faced Canadian anti-immigration crusader and straight up crazy motherfucker. Oh, he had a nice sort of aw-shucks speaking style that, along with his pleasant Canadian accent, gave him the air of a slightly frazzled professor. But he was perhaps the most extreme extremist of the entire weekend.
“When I go to the Wal-Mart I don’t see a group of young Negroes with backward hats on looking to lift somebody’s wallet,” he said, in praise of the charms of Harrison’s non-diversity. “When I took a brief stroll from my hotel, you didn’t have some 13-year-old negress trying to sell herself to me….We are being ethnically cleansed from the cities of America!” he thundered. “I don’t know if it was the Hutus cleansing the Tutsis, or the Tutsis cleansing the Hutus. Well, they should all be cleansed.”
At this point one can almost imagine the ghost of A.H. himself waxing indignant: “‘Nazi?’ Come on! I was just a good German nationalist who had problems with the multi-cult and, ah, ethnic special interest groups. I was a militant pro-family patriot, dammit, and I built the German economy. And the autobahn! Enough with the namecalling, already!”
OK, OK, I give up! I’ll try not to call these people “Nazis” any more, and certainly not “racists,” heaven forbid. What’s in a name? The Fourniers have convinced me: the word “conservative” will do very nicely after all. Which, on reflection, is all that I’ve really been saying all along.