“If this country starts to spiral out of control … there will be parts of the country that will rise up.”
Few places have deeper scars from violent invective and verbal incitement than this North Carolina citywhere people still speak in whispers, embarrassed by the events of Nov.10, 1898. Wilmington is tragic testament to the fact that socialprogress is not inevitable and that, left unchallenged, hateful speech and words frequently morph into violence.
Today,talk of an antigovernment revolution has gone mainstream in America.One federal law-enforcement agency has discovered 50 new militiagroups, including one made up of past and current police officers andsoldiers. While in office, President Bush was the target of roughly3,000 death threats a year. President Obama is on pace to quintuplethat. In this environment, Americans might well reflect on Wilmington’sexperience 111 years ago.
[snip]
This spring, covering an antitax “tea party” protest in Boston, Fox News Business anchor Cody Willard raged, “Guys, when are we going to wake up and start fighting the fascism (1) that seems to be permeating this country?”
The Rev. William J. Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, recalls similar sentiment on Southern billboards during the civil-rights era, “painting Martin Luther King as a communist, a socialist, and anti-American.”
(1) While the terms fascist/fascism tends to have a fluid definition, they fundamentally advocate the creation of a single party state (Republicrats) with the belief that the majority (European Americans) is unsuited to govern itself through democracy and by reaffirming the benefits of (racial) inequality. Fascist governments forbid and suppress openness and opposition to the fascist state and the fascist movement (except by non-white pressure groups).