Shame, purity and concentration camp news. posted by Richard Seymour

CNN caught a bit of flak for allowing its far-right host Glenn Beck to demand of recently elected Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison that he prove he wasn't "working with our enemies", but FAIR points out that this is nothing new from Beck. Some of his greatest hits include:

All you Muslims who have sat on your frickin' hands the whole time and have not been marching in the streets and have not been saying, 'Hey, you know what? There are good Muslims and bad Muslims. We need to be the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head.' I'm telling you, with God as my witness... human beings are not strong enough, unfortunately, to restrain themselves from putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it. When things—when people become hungry, when people see that their way of life is on the edge of being over, they will put razor wire up and just based on the way you look or just based on your religion, they will round you up. Is that wrong? Oh my gosh, it is Nazi, World War II wrong, but society has proved it time and time again: It will happen.

The disclaimer is delicious - this is a strict Freudian case of projection, in the Totem/Taboo sense. As in, I don't want to kill you, the totem does! While Beck stares into the abyss, the abyss stares straight back into him.

You want the profiling to stop? Then, here's an idea. Stop murdering innocent people. Stop excusing the people who do. You do that for a while, and I guarantee you won't have any more problems at the airports. Stop blowing stuff up and the world just might be your oyster. Otherwise, it's going to be like that movie, The Siege. You remember that movie? The Muslims will see the West through razor wire if things don't change.

And so on and on, Beck's stern warnings to the second largest, but least represented, religious group in America. Perhaps the very fact that a lunatic like Beck is allowed to expostulate in this fashion on national television - on CNN, that most lib'rul of meeja - is itself a deeper case of projection. We don't want to kill you, upper class liberals assure Muslims, Glenn Beck does!

The Nazis, whom Beck casually references, were filled with bile for 'soft', 'weak', 'feminine' Germany, the one that had grown flabby and allowed the enemies within to defeat the nation during WWI. Jews, revolutionaries, women, corrupt financiers - all were doing Germany down, making excuses for its enemies, always blaming Germany. The cause of Germany's defeat was not primarily the external enemy, but the enemy within. In the same way, Petainians saw France's occupation by the Nazis as both a symptom of its moral decline and weakness, and also an opportunity to rectify it, to halt the endemic impurity, fluidity and permeability of France. Impotence, flaccidity and other phallic metaphors were invoked to describe the state of decay. Military reversals have fed into this purging logic throughout the twentieth century, including in the United States after Vietnam.

Post-9/11, this is exemplified not by idiots like Pat Robertson who blamed hedonistic pro-abortion Godless liberals for the attacks, but mostly by those liberals who insisted that their former comrades were guilty of 'self-hatred', sympathy for the enemy, moral relativism and so on. The drive for 'moral clarity' was symptomatic of this tendency, shared by neoconservatives and 'liberal hawks'. Bush remarked after 9/11 that people viewed America as "impotent", "a flaccid, you know, kind of technologically competent but not very tough country that was willing to launch a cruise missile out of a submarine and that'd be it. I do believe there is an image of America out there that we are so materialistic, that we're almost hedonistic, that we don't have values, and that when struck, we wouldn't fight back."

And so in Iraq, where most soldiers literally believe they are fighting to avenge 9/11, the 'war on terror' was characterised by extreme machismo, multiple purges, deliberate and conspicuous humiliation, the steely resolve not to be undermined by liberal guilt and sympathy for the "hajji". There, Muslims really did perceive the US through razorwire, as troops sealed off entire towns and villages with it. As in Iraq, so in Afghanistan and Guantanamo and any number of secret Stasi-style torture-shops. Panzer imperialism demands the restoration of America's "awe" and "majesty", as an excited PNACer demanded in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the twin towers, if necessary by "scorching" the south of Lebanon, Tehran and so on.

Unpatriotic liberals, Muslims who merely go about their business, the enemies within, the "girlie men", the saps and sissies, those who "swoon" for theocrats - all must be purged. We need a Military Commissions Act and a Patriot Act and exceptional measures and phone-tapping and 'random' searches, the monitoring of libraries and the purging of 'far left' and Arab academics from educational institutions. Muslims must beware the concentration camp. This logic doesn't drive policy any more than resentment drives a hostile take-over bid, but it does provide a perfect complement, an implicit and ever-present ideological legitimacy. The unspoken address from the rarefied American ruling class is "we don't hate Americans, we don't want to take away their rights, bomb them, assassinate them lock them up - bin Laden does!"