Sunday, April 08, 2018

Advocating violence

Ann Althouse writes,
The violence of Madeleine Albright's NYT op-ed, "Will We Stop Trump Before It’s Too Late?"
Here's the first sentence:
On April 28, 1945 — 73 years ago — Italians hung the corpse of their former dictator Benito Mussolini upside down next to a gas station in Milan....
"Will We Stop Trump Before It’s Too Late?" has coy deniability. But why on earth would you go straight to dangling the upside down corpse of Benito Mussolini unless you meant to say violence is necessary?

The next 2 sentences also present death as the solution:
Two days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath the streets of war-ravaged Berlin. Fascism, it appeared, was dead.

...She probably didn't write the title, so she may be out of the loop about the synergy between the title and the first paragraph. Once you get past that, you've got an op-ed that's too dull to print. It seems like some boilerplate speech of hers. Ridiculous, but actually also appalling, because the invitation to violence is plainly there and ought never to have been published.
Read more here.

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