Have any mass murderers been caught with left wing books? I don't think so.

[Joe Fields]

When are we going to get serious about holding people like Limbaugh, Savage, Beck, Hannity responsible for their hate messages, in the form of their daily propaganda radio exercises and hate books that they publish?

Seriously, do you see any mass murderers holding "left wing" material?

[Barack_America]

1. Do you consider "The Catcher in the Rye" to be a "left wing book"?

That seems to be a favorite amongst Presidential and celebrity shooters.

[Joe Fields]

2. No.

[Barack_America]

3. Well alrighty then.

I just asked given Conservative's tendency to ban/burn that book.

And, in that case, I can't think of any.

[Quantess]

40. Why don't they like Catcher In the Rye?

All I remember about it (I read it about 15 years ago), was that the main character was a depressed, lonely, cynic who questioned religion and society.

[Barack_America]

43. I think you just answered your own question.

"who questioned religion and society".

And I guess there was that bit with the prostitute.

Who knows.

[amyrose2712]

52. Sex and cursing too. nt

[H2O Man]

48. I'm not sure

that many of them are "mass murderers," as in the OP's question.

[Ken Burch]

61. Still, they usually only have ONE target.

If Chapman had wasted Paul, George, and Ringo as well, then it'd be different.

[Barack_America]

66. Of course.

I was just searching my brain and that book is the only thing that I could think of that was remotely close.

[Ken Burch]

67. Fair enough.

no worries.

[MrPerson]

4. Maybe the UnaBomber?

[Seeking Serenity]

5. Ted Kaczynski, a/k/a the Unabomber?

Is that one?

[Joe Fields]

15. I should have been more specific. I'm talking about the recent(this year)

rash of mass murders. Have any of these criminals been caught with books written by Jon Stewart, or any other lefty?

[Warpy]

16. He was a Luddite who despised socialism

and capitalism and everything that didn't fit into his madness.

[Ken Burch]

68. No, he was mainly about WRITING a book, and it wasn't left wing,

and remember, he had to blow shit up to get anybody to read it.

[conspirator]

80. He was more crazy than left wing. He wanted to kill scientists

As a left winger I would be more inclined to kill businessmen and politicians

[walkaway]

6. I thought Ted was one of those radical Libertarians.

Pay no taxes, bad government, live in the woods and keep yer gun ready and waitin' for the Feds.

When I lived in Colorado the hills were full of them. Some gone back to nature and some born there but most totally paranoid.

[Oregone]

7. I think he was anti-tech. Also fervently anti-socialism

[old mark]

8. Not since the Weather Underground in the '70's. And they were not

mass murderers per se, just bombers. The RWers have been seriously hating us for many years, the farther right the more hateful. I think it has a lot to do with their delusions about religion - they feel they are "instruments of god's will" or some such craziness. They seem to think they will be vindicated and even that they will pick up support and followers as people understand their motivation. They feel they have a "cause".
They are certainly crazy.

mark

NOTE: This is one more reason why only Democrats should have guns.

[Democracyinkind]

9. Ted Kaczynski wasn't exactly a leftie.

If taking LSD as a company guinea pig under the good ol' "Doctor" Murray in Harvard doesn't make you one, that is.

[Oregone]

11. Hey, how about Jim Jones?

Wasn't he a leftie?

on edit: meant to post to OP

[mitchum]

12. Yes,but I am very content with the public remembering him as a religious nut

[Democracyinkind]

13. If so, a very delusional one. Where's the liberal part in brainwashing?

I don't think one or two progressive statements make a leftie.

We're trying to find an example of someone committing random, more or less spontaneous carnage in whose home the cops later find leftie hate literature or something like that.
I don't even think that exists. Do we have our own Turner Diaries?

[Oregone]

19. "I don't think one or two progressive statements make a leftie."

Jim Jones went far, far beyond a few "progressive statements". Read up about him a bit.

[Democracyinkind]

22. I know, I know. Sorry that I idealize the concept of left. Can't bring myself to see

Jones or Stalin as a leftie.

I suppose conservatives don't hold Hitler in high esteem either.
Well, you know what I mean.

[Warpy]

17. He was when he started

then turned hard right when he got everybody to Jonestown and tasted real power over other people's lives.

The drugs assisted in his rapid turn to the right, making him paranoid all the time.

[Democracyinkind]

24. Thinking of the closing speech in Jonestown , I agree with you.

[arcadian]

71. I would say, Jim Jones too,

But I'm convinced that the guy was a CIA asset.

[Oregone]

74. Huh?

The guy was a suicidal insane nutjob, active in fringe religion and leftist social & political causes. Why would the CIA touch him with a ten foot pole?

[arcadian]

81. Why would a U.S. Congressman touch him with a ten foot pole?

[pnwmom]

10. Joseph Stalin was a mass murderer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin

From Wikipedia:

Researchers before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union attempting to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million.<71> After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives also became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement – for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.<72>
The official Soviet archival records do not contain comprehensive figures for some categories of victims, such as the those of ethnic deportations or of German population transfers in the aftermath of WWII.<73> Other notable exclusions from NKVD data on repression deaths include the Katyn massacre, other killings in the newly occupied areas, and the mass shootings of Red Army personnel (deserters and so-called deserters) in 1941. Also, the official statistics on Gulag mortality exclude deaths of prisoners taking place shortly after their release but which resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps.<74> Some historians also believe the official archival figures of the categories that were recorded by Soviet authorities to be unreliable and incomplete.<75><76> In addition to failures regarding comprehensive recordings, as one additional example, Robert Gellately and Simon Sebag-Montefiore argue the many suspects beaten and tortured to death while in "investigative custody" were likely not to have been counted amongst the executed.<8><77>
Historians working after the Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines.<78> Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million – a total of about 9 million victims of repression.<79>
Some have also included deaths of 6 to 8 million people in the 1932–1933 famine as victims of Stalin's repression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others, or simply an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization.<49><80><81>
Accordingly, if famine victims are included, a minimum of around 10 million deaths — 6 million minimum from famine and 4 million minimum from other causes — are attributable to the regime,<82> with a number of recent historians suggesting a likely total of around 20 million, citing much higher victim totals from executions, gulags, deportations and other causes.<83> Adding 6–8 million famine victims to Erlikman's estimates above, for example, would yield a total of between 15 and 17 million victims. Researcher Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million.<84> Others maintain that their earlier higher victim total estimates are correct.<85><86>

[AllieB]

14. Stalin was not a leftie. He was a dictator.

[pnwmom]

31. It is possible to be both a leftie and a dictator. n/t

[AllieB]

34. The policies of the Soviet Union under Stalin were far from left wing.

The Soviet Union started out that way, but wealth and power consolidated in the hands of a few, creating an oligarchy of the politically connected and those that profiteered from the state. None of the communist dictatorships were truly communist.

[pnwmom]

35. Perhaps not, but Stalin was heavily influenced by the writings of Marx and Lenin.

I have often said, however, that the only true communists I've known have been Catholic nuns.

:shrug:

[AllieB]

36. If you look at the policies of the Soviet Union under Stalin, he clearly rejected Leninism

and Marxism. If you've read any bios of Stalin, he considered Lenin a rival and an enemy. it was clear that he was going his own way trying to get away from Lenin's philosophy. My sister wrote her thesis on Stalin's purges, and she paid me to proof read and edit her thesis when I was in college. So I know quite a bit about Stalin, although I was a finance and economics major. :-)

[pnwmom]

46. You didn't say anything about Marx. According to your sister, did Stalin

reject Marx, too?

[AllieB]

47. In theory no. In practice yes.

Have you read any Russian history? The Soviet Union was communist under Lenin and fascist under Stalin. The rhtoric was there, but the reality was closer to Nazi Germany. Stalin's Russia fits the definition of fascism to a tee.

The 14 characteristics are:

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism



Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights



Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause


Supremacy of the Military



Rampant Sexism



Controlled Mass Media



Obsession with National Security



Religion and Government are Intertwined


Corporate Power is Protected


Labor Power is Suppressed



Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts



Obsession with Crime and Punishment



Rampant Cronyism and Corruption



Fraudulent Elections

[amyrose2712]

53. That sounds somewhat familiar.

[AllieB]

56. It does sound like the last eight years.

:scared:

[pnwmom]

57. The point is that Stalin operated with left-wing Marxist rhetoric.

Therefore left-wing writings have been associated with murderers.

There is no philosophy that cannot be abused.

[AllieB]

60. Wrong. Again, have you read any of his speeches? Biographies?

His rhetoric could just as easily be right-wing with a few tweaks. No true Marxist/communist state has ever existed. WIkipedia has a bias, though you quote it as a historical source (read post #58). Stalin was an evil motherfucker, but he was no more a Marxist than Hitler.

[pnwmom]

63. "No true Marxist/communist state has ever existed."

That's the same kind of thing the Ayn Rand types say about capitalism.

When a system fails, the claim of its followers is always that it wasn't carried out perfectly enough.

[AllieB]

65. Not even remotely a communist/marxist, but thanks for playing.

If you actually read a book about Russia, you'd realize that they were heading toward communism from 1918-1923, but after Lenin died, they moved toward Stalinism which has nothing to do with communism.

Judging by some of your previous posts, you typically provide unsubstantiated, broad-brush characterizations of supposed communist dictatorships without actually doing any research aside from what you read on Wikipedia or see in the mainstream media.

[pnwmom]

75. And you're the expert because you proofread your sister's thesis.

Right.

Maybe you should read the OP again. It says: "Seriously, do you see any mass murderers holding 'left wing' material?"

The question isn't whether Stalin, the mass murderer, was a "real" communist or not. The question is whether he held left-wing material. And the answer is that he did.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/prof_josephstalin.html

SNIP

Stalin began his studies at the seminary as a devout believer in Orthodox Christianity. He was soon exposed to the radical ideas of fellow students, however, and began to read illegal literature based on the works of German political philosopher Karl Marx. In 1899, just as he was about to graduate, he gave up his religious education to devote his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. While employed as an accountant in Tbilisi, Stalin spread Marxist propaganda among railway workers on behalf of the local Social Democratic organization. After moving to the seaport of Bat'umi, where he organized a large workers' demonstration in 1902, Stalin was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police. A year later he was sentenced to exile in the Russian region of Siberia. He soon managed to escape, however, and was back in Georgia by early 1904.

When the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in 1903, Stalin was drawn to the more militant Bolsheviks, who were led by Vladimir Lenin. In Georgia, where Menshevism predominated, Stalin soon gained a reputation as a belligerent and staunch follower of Lenin, whom he had first met in 1905 at a conference in Finland.

In 1905 Stalin married Yekaterina Svanidze, a Georgian woman who died two years later. Stalin was arrested and exiled by imperial police in 1908 because of his illegal underground activities. His escape the next year was followed by further arrests, exiles, and secret trips abroad during the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1912 Lenin elevated Stalin, who by this time had adopted the Russian pseudonym meaning "man of steel," to the leading Bolshevik Party body, the Central Committee. At Lenin's behest, Stalin wrote his chief theoretical work, Marxism and the National Question. Stalin was arrested and sent to Siberia before the essay was published in 1913.

SNIP

[AllieB]

76. No, I've actally read dozens of books on Stalin, Russian history and Marxism.

I also took courses in college on Russian history-and studied the Russian language too. How about you? It seems that you went to the University of Google, because your arguments show a shallow grasp of history. And have read your piss poor arguments before with some other posters here. I'd say it's somewhat of a pattern. :-)

And your link addresses 1905, not after Lenin's death when Stalin took over power. The mass murders occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. You may want to pick up a biography of Stalin and read the part when he was in power.

[pnwmom]

77. You keep trying to make this a history debate, but it's not.

The question in the OP is whether any mass murderer held left-wing materials, and the answer is that Stalin did -- he held them and he distributed them. The fact that he did his mass murdering decades later is immaterial.

[murdoch]

58. Was he?

You quote Robert Conquest here. Conquest worked for the propaganda department of British intelligence, and never denied it. In the 1940s, Churchill was more anti-Soviet than even Roosevelt was. How objective is he as a source of material?

I also am not sure what these numbers mean. Anyone who died in prison is considered some nefarious death. Is every death of the overwhelmingly black and Latino men in US prisons a nefarious death? Americans always talked about how people in Cuban prisons were gulag prisoners - until Castro let them all come to the US during the Mariel boat lift. Suddenly those propaganda stories about Cuban "gulags" disappeared and we began seeing headlines about how dare Castro open his prisons with murderers etc. and let them come to the US. Cuba's "gulags" miraculously became prisons when the US had to deal with the "persecuted" murderers Castro let come to the US.

Stalin did have political persecution - against certain factions of self-described communists. The vast majority of people jailed in the purge in the 1930s were communists. Now you can have thoughts one way or the other, but it is odd to see people from the capitalist west step into this infighting within the communist party and say one faction is being persecuted. A very small minority of people who could be deemed political prisoners in the 1930s were not members of the communist party.

If we look at the history of the USSR and how many died during it - how many Indians were slaughtered to form the United States? How many blacks died on the middle passage to the US, and were worked to death before the slave trade stopped? The US is hardly the country to accuse another country of mass murder.

The USSR did not engage in mass murder outside of World War II, and if you want to bring WWII in you can talk about what the US and/or UK did in Dresden, Hiroshima and other places. Probably the worst thing the USSR did was resettle certain populations (like the US did to the Indians), but the numbers given in your sample are grossly inflated. And the US resettlement and slaughter of Indians was generally more brutal.

[AllieB]

64. I agree with almost everything you say, except that Stalin was a mass murderer.

Millions died suring the state-imposed Ukrainian famine. there was widescale persecution and deportation of ethnic minorities and political enemies. Millions died in the gulags, and most weren't hardened criminals.

[corruptmewithpower]

18. Che, Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Tito, Mao . . . all read left wing books.

[Joe Fields]

20. Please excuse me. I was not alluding to dictators or guerrilla leaders.

I was relating to the current wave of violent gun killings in the U.S.

Were any of the perpetrators carrying any Jon Stewart books or books from any other left wing talk show host?

[AllieB]

23. I wouldn't include Che in the same breath as the others.

[corruptmewithpower]

70. Che was Fidel's executioner. He murdered thousands.

Che Guevara


http://brookesnews.com/060910fontova.html

[AllieB]

78. Link from a RW Cuban expat blog?

Give me a break.

[corruptmewithpower]

79. Do you prefer Wikiquote?

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.

As quoted in The Cuban Revolution : Years of Promise (2005) by Teo A. Babun and Victor Andres Triay, p. 57

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Che_Guevara

[liberalmuse]

27. Really? Could you list them, please?

I'd be very interested in knowing exactly which 'lefty' books they read.

[wartrace]

29. I'm waiting on proof the killers were "caught" with any reading material.

Seems like the OP is trying to link those on the right to these recent shootings with no actual documentation. Hey why aim so low? Lets blame them for global warming too!

[pnwmom]

33. Marx and Lenin.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Владимир Ильич Лени?) (22 April 1870 - 21 January 1924), born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Russian: Владимир Ильич Ульяно? and commonly known by the names V.I. Lenin or simply Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, Bolshevik communist politician, principal leader of the October Revolution and the first head of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the Soviet Union. In 1998, he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.<1> His contributions to Marxist theory are commonly referred to as Leninism.

From Wikipedia

[corruptmewithpower]

72. Why, do you want to follow in their mass murdering footsteps?

[moondust]

51. "The most radical revolutionary..."

"will become a conservative the day after the revolution." - Hannah Arendt

[cherokeeprogressive]

21. It would have been much easier and less confusing to just say

I hate right wingers!

[wartrace]

25. I was unaware that the recent killers had been "caught" with right wing books.

That cop killer in Pittsburgh? Do you have a link to this information? Just curious to see if there is any proof to the statement that the above right wing pundits are responsible for these shootings. Surely Jiverly up in New York wasn't a listener was he? He had trouble with the English language.

It would be a shame to discover that someone was exploiting these murders in order to silence speech they don't care for.

[RamboLiberal]

30. Try the TN Church killer - He cited Bernie Goldberg's book as his reason

I wonder if Glenn Beck knows who Jim Adkisson is. Adkisson made headlines on July 28, 2008, when he brought his sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and, after whipping it out of a guitar case, opened fire on parishioners while a group of schoolchildren performed songs up by the altar. Adkisson killed two people and wounded several others.

2 paragraphs from Adkisson's manifesto.

"Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them....

"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."

Glenn Beck and the rise of Fox News' militia media http://mediamatters.org/columns/200904070009?f=h_top

For years the Conservatives have blamed rappers and the likes of Marilyn Manson for influencing their audience to commit acts of violence. Some of these same conservatives need to look at this event and take a look at the hate they preach on a daily basis. Below is the story from Knoxnews.

O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity on accused shooter's reading list 4-page letter outlines frustration, hatred of 'liberal movement'

http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/jim-adkisson-read-books-savage-oreilly-and-hannity

[wartrace]

37. Okay.

Seriously, two incidents in the past year might be loosely tied to people who listened to right wing radio programs. Hardly enough evidence to "hold the right wing radio people accountable".

[AllieB]

38. If you have studied history, you know that hate radio has played a role

in recent genocides and wars like Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and in Nazi Germany. Years of exposure to right-wing mouthbreathers could certainly push people over the edge. You'd be a fool to believe otherwise.

[wartrace]

39. Get a grip.

Are we talking genocide or a disgruntled recently laid off loser shooting the police? I bet he drank coca-cola too, is there a link there?
Face it, you want to exploit these shootings to silence critics. I believe they have the right to free speech until it reaches the point of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater. I may not like their message but they have every right to broadcast whatever they wish.

[LanternWaste]

41. I certainly don't see hypothesizing causation

"ou want to exploit these shootings to silence critics."

I certainly don't see hypothesizing causation as "silencing critics", but then again, I'm probably not as clever as you are.

Personally, I'm more than content to let the Popularity Contest of ideas do that on its own, and watch as those demagogues implode themselves by instructing their listeners to kill liberals one too many times...

On edit: I'm being more civil these days.

[AllieB]

44. You're nicer than me. I'm sick of visitors who like to paint liberals

with a PC broad brush. :eyes:

[LanternWaste]

49. I doubt that

"You're nicer than me"

I doubt that-- I've read more than a few of your posts, and realize that you're a very nice, very caring person who is simply very, very passionate about many of the progressive ideals we hold. :)





Actually, I'm a real grump most of the time. Ever watch The Muppet Show? Remember those two old codgers in the balcony who always had caustic and not-so-nice things to say about the last skit? Well, I was recently told by a co-worker that I'm going to be one of those guys before long. I threw her into a busy highway until she apologized :P

(But really-- you're a swell poster, and one I look forward to reading whenever I see your sobriquet)

[AllieB]

50. Aww thanks.

:blush:

I like your posts too. I've been pretty stressed out and grumpy lately. Most of it has to do with job insecurity, like everyone else.

And I loved the Muppets. Fond memories of my childhood. :-)

[AllieB]

42. Calm down. No one is talking about silencing critics.

Based on history and human nature, it's impossible to deny that right wing, violent talk radio has influenced people to commit horrific acts. No one is talking about banning free speech-how did you extrapolate that from a simple, historical fact that right-wing rhetoric has caused genocide in Rwanda and Nazi Germany? It seems that you think libruls are all about PC speech and all that crap. I wonder where you got that idea? :eyes:

[tekisui]

59. Does yelling revolution on the radio equate to fire in a theather?

Does exploiting anger and economic desperation towards an ill-defined 'other', coupled with violent rhetoric equate to fire in a theater?

How far should hate speech be protected by free speech?

[AllieB]

62. The right-wing freaks out when libruls try to control the conversation

or point to historical precedent when condemning RW hate speech (see above). They always say liberals are PC, yadda yadda. But if that free speech has a gay or feminist theme, the wingnuts are the first to condemn it. Hypocrites.

[Barack_America]

69. The guy left a note saying he was doing this to "kill liberals"....

...and that he intended it to be viewed as a "hate crime".

[liberalmuse]

26. Well, it's kind of hard to whip up the hate and rage...

after reading, "To Kill A Mockingbird". Lefty books make you want to be a better person.

[damntexdem]

28. Well, Pol Pot.

But then it was the Communist government of Viet Nam that put him out of business -- so that's a wash.

;-)

[blogslut]

32. Supposedly, one of Charles Manson's sons

...was named after the male protagonist of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

[Ikonoklast]

45. RAH and his writings are anything but leftist.

Rabidly Libertarian would describe them better.

[blogslut]

55. Perhaps

But that particular book struck me as quite liberal.

[and-justice-for-all]

54. Ted Bundy was a registered repuke and also did some campaign work for them too..nt

[rucky]

73. Alot of theft resulted from an Abie Hoffman book.

does that count?