Ben Domenech is a Blogger recently hired by the Washington Post to provide Conservative commentary. He has been a controversial figure so I wanted to find out more about him. I learned that he often used the name Augustine to post his opinions. I found that going back and finding posts by Ben Domenech under the pseudonym Augustine did not lead me to support him, which I had hoped. In fact what I found disturbed me. So, I took one quote and posted it on the RedState website with the only comment on it being, “Make up your own mind.” I was called an idiot several times, lefty, lazy, a bigot, dishonest, ignorant, and racist, all from words that were quoted and clearly stated as not my own. I didn’t expect to be blocked from posting further comment on the website, but I am. That is why I am posting this here. I guess freedom of speech is not an option in the RedState. I am a little distraught because I really liked to make clarifying centrist arguments on that site. Here is the quote got me in hot water. “It just …
“It just happens that killing black babies has the happy result of reducing crime. I do not question the research or logic of Levitt’s argument. If a specifiable group is inordinately responsible for a social problem, it follows that eliminating a large number of people belonging to that group will reduce the problem.”
Much of the accusation that led to my being sanctioned was based on that I took the quote out of context. So, I am posting a link to the entire quote here. It is long and that is why I didn’t post the entire thing in the comment box. The entire quote is not better then my excerpt.
I was not unfair to Augustine in placing this quote. Augustine was making a comment in a very convoluted manner, against abortion as a form of Genocide for African Americans. However, it is hard to glean any objection that he might have had to Freakonomics the study he was arguing from. In fact Augustine immediately steers the commentary as a condemnation of African American leadership as being compliant with killing off their own people, but he never refutes Levitt and Donohue’s claim that abortion reduces crime. Not necessary if he doesn’t feel that there is anything to refute, but he goes on to make a direct correlation between Levitt’s study which was done in Scandinavia, with African Americans being aborted and crime reduction in the United States. He states very clearly that killing African Americans, whether through abortion or other means would reduce crime. He only tacitly refers to the moral objection that that would engender, but quickly goes back to supporting the findings in Levitt’s report as true. That is where my quote came in. His use of the word, “happy,” when he says, “It just happens that killing black babies has the happy result of reducing crime” was particularly telling.
Augustine, and therefore Ben Domenech, is using a very subtle form of rhetoric designed to hide the underlying message. He purports to be giving the message that abortion is a form of self genocide for African American’s, or better yet a genocide put on them by their own leadership’s support for abortion, but that is an easy point to make. So, why bring in what Levitt had to say? Why bring up crime? Why connect crime and African Americans? Why bring up African American’s as being a drag on society? And why bring up the extermination of African Americans as a means to reduce crime and other societal ills?
I don’t know about you, but I wonder about how Weimar Germany got to be Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Not the over use of the term, but the historical event itself. I try to think about the anatomy of a change from looking at people as being annoying or burdensome, to wanting to exterminate them as a race? It has happened several times in our history. It happened in Rhuwanda, it happened in Laos. We don’t call them Holocaust anymore we call them Genocides, but they are the same thing.
I know Germans. It is hard to imagine them moving to such an absolute extreme and to such an irrational solution as to try to wipe out a people as an answer to their problems, but the truth is that they did. So how did it happen? I envision it started with imagined annoyances. I couldn’t speculate about what happened in Germany, but safe it to say the Jews somehow became a societal pariah. A larger group began attributing many social ills to the Jews. It might have started with jokes, then increased to tasteless jokes, and then went on to where persons were joking about extermination, which is not funny, as if it were. I also imagine that once these things solidified in the society the rights of Jews as people were sharply limited. Then as what ever societal ills increased, there was political leverage to be gained by pointing the finger at the Jews for their problems, and finally, there would have to have been the leap, from tasteless jokes about extermination as a solution, to the actual thing.
The reality of the situation is that the extermination of the Jews solved nothing for Germany. It was all an illusion, a way to distract Germany from its real economic troubles and the need to find real solutions to them. The real problems of the Weimar Republic were that do to heavy barrowing by the central government their currency became worthless. The reality of the problem was that the government was put into this situation do to the fact that heavy sanctions imposed on it by the world after World War I created an unviable economy in Germany. It wasn’t the Jews that were the problem.
Without the tasteless jokes of extermination as a solution, I don’t believe that people would have gone in that direction. Without the brain washing that comes from accepting that kind of sick thinking, the German people could not have been pacified enough to accept the concentration camps.
I know as an American, faced with operating a gas chamber at the point of a gun, I would have chosen to fight and die, rather than be privy to such a heinous thing. If the nation turned on African Americans, and began to exterminate them, what would you be prepared to do? If you say that you would pull the lever, then you dishonor all the millions of American lives that fought so hard to rid the world of Hitler and his Genocide of the Jews. If you decide not to pull the lever then you would understand commentary like that of Augustine/ Domenech is just the beginning to one day being faced with that awful choice.
Domenech as Augustine does not represent the left, but represents something far more sinister, far more subtle and far more evil.
