The recent move to suppress the open display of the American swastika, better known as the Confederate Flag, has gotten to former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen. First he notes that the paper he writes for, the Washington Post, is named after a slaveowner. Then he emulates the Charleston, South Carolina shooter by looking up statistics on black-on-black and black-on-white crime to justify his ideological blinders. And then he attacks us city folk for some kind of reverse bigotry and intolerance.
Now come all these self-righteous liberals from cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington, doing what the Charleston shooter failed to do — sowing division and discord where none exist.
Let’s be clear: The recent criticism of the Confederate flag is really not about a flag — it is about the people of the South. It is driven by the notion that most Southerners are a bunch of racists who agree with the Charleston shooter’s murderous actions. As we saw after the shooting, nothing could be further from the truth.
So, the first thing is that if you don’t want to be perceived as agreeing with shooter’s murderous actions, you shouldn’t follow his example by reacting to the death of a bunch of black people at the hands of a white man by citing crime statistics about black people who die at the hands of black people.
Now, Thiessen might argue that he’s only citing these statistics to show that “there is no race war in America.” Fine, I guess everyone should just shut up then and go home, including the legislature in South Carolina.
Really, I don’t know anyone who is arguing that there is anything like a race war going on, although if you really dig deep down into what people are saying about the Confederate flag (on both sides) it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t symbolize a fight that blacks have been losing ever since the Emancipation Proclamation morphed into Jim Crow and then the modern Southern Strategy. Maybe electing a black president and finally getting a consensus around the idea that the Confederate flag is a treasonous bit of pro-segregation shit is an indication that the tide has turned a little bit. I think this is making Mark Thiessen uncomfortable.
Thiessen is clearly alarmed by these changes, but he professes to believe that they won’t change anything:
Moreover, none of this political correctness is helping African Americans at all. Getting rid of the Confederate flag or banning “The Dukes of Hazzard” won’t save a single black life. It won’t do a thing to help the nearly one quarter of young African American men who are unemployed — or to lift up black kids trapped in failing schools. Instead of sowing division with historical purges, let’s celebrate how far our nation has come — and focus our energies on actually helping those who have been left behind.
It might be hard to envision the causal mechanism whereby kicking the racists’ asses in the Columbia statehouse and getting corporate America to define the Confederacy as obscene will save a single black life or get anyone a job or a good education. But it might be easier for Thiessen to see how the cause and effect works here if he could spend 400 years on the losing end of the culture war. Maybe he could see what it’s like to have an entire (successful) political strategy launched on the predicate that his people are lawless violent criminals who breed like animals and must be incarcerated in huge numbers. Maybe if every time Thiessen tried to get some money for his local schools he had to watch politicians bitch about giving taxpayer dollars to shiftless layabouts then he’d begin to understand how being a whipping boy for Republican power and Southern heritage is a losing proposition that costs his people jobs, opportunities, and lives.
It may not be easy to calculate just how allowing the Confederate flag to fly with pride winds up killing black people and denying them equal opportunity or economic justice, but you can believe that this was part of the equation going through the Charleston shooter’s mind. He convinced himself that black people were taking over, which is basically what Thiessen is concluding as well.
But, here’s the good news.
Since there is no race war in America, there is nothing for Thiessen to really worry about. Since the caricatures these Southern Heritage folks made of blacks were lies, they will not be treated like white Rhodesians.
Of course, to the extent that non-Southerners do see Southerners as a bunch of racists, it has something to do with their attachment to the slavedriver flag.
Trying to prop up the Southern Strategy, nothing more. Once an operative, always an operative.
And once again, the Statehouse is in Columbia, not Charleston. Hasn’t been in Charleston for quite some time.
There are fewer “Hell No” folks this time around, which is what is allowing the the SC General Assembly to quickly deal with the vote. The Post and Cuurier whip count still shows a vote to take down the flag. House debate today. Some GOP legislators predicting anonymously that it will be gone on next Monday. We will see.
But Thiessen is exactly the sort of New Yorker who has always let the South off the hook for political gain. Call him what he is: a Copperhead. The South does not need defenders like this snake.
They don’t understand Southern culture, says the dude who grew up in Manhattan.
(I sort of knew Marc when we were both students at Vassar College. He never seemed all that Southern to me in our expensive Northeastern private college)
So Mark Thiessen is going to lecture us all about our “political correctness”, our lack of understanding of “southern culture” and how we are all apparently fanning the flames in pursuit of a “race war”. And all the while demonstrating that he has never read a history book. That he has absolutely no idea how interconnected today’s situation is with the legal and institutional framework that was laid in this country close to 400 years ago, and the vestiges of which are still present in much of our current American system.
“No”, he says. Everyone should just get the fuck over it and move on. Is the man an imbecile? Or is he just too damn intellectually and morally lazy to look beyond the end of his nose? He is the perfect embodiment of the ignorant white guy who feels absolutely no compunction in lecturing others who have suffered for centuries the kinds of injustices that he never bothers to even notice exists, while he peers out from his comfortable perch of multi-generation entitlement.
Jane Mayer — New Yorker:
…lecturing us on “political correctness”… As someone noted yesterday on twitter, I think, “It’s not a PC test, it’s an IQ test.” Guess what, Marc, you failed.
Yes, all of those South Carolina state senators are nothing more than self-righteous liberals. All of them.
“blah blah blah lib’rul divisiveness blah blah blah political correctness”—the same mindless slogans peddled from Conservative Central to be gorged on by enraged rightwing assholes.
It would be a serious blow to rightwing America to lose one of its treasured symbols of white supremacy and they don’t like it, as could be expected. It was a “respectable” way to convey the time-honored sentiment and they loved having it (still!) be a part of their proud state gub’mint tradition. But to hear conservative blather and concern trolling that removing it “won’t do anything for African Americans!” is of course intellectual dishonesty of the highest order, since conservatives haven’t the slightest interest about “actually” helping a single Black person in America, circa 2015.
Mass incarceration? Doesn’t exist! Police brutality? Slander on our nation’s hee-ros! Handgun regulation? Mah constitutional rights trump your life! Affirmative action? Unconstitutional! more student loan subsidies? Socialisticizm! Minimum wage increases! More Socializm!! Ad infinitum, ad nauseum. The one thing I know is that American “conservatives” (like this turd) have NO interest in “actually” helping Black people, and they never will.
But they will help drive a run on the last remaining stocks of confederate battle flags, haha. Proud may it wave, Rightwing assholes!
There’s no race war, but there has been a long something going on against black people in this country for as long as I can remember, and before that. And, as a black person, it’s hard not to wish sometimes that I could get my hands on people like Thiessen and beat the crap out of them.
Funny thing, that, willipr. As a white person, I feel the lure of the very same wish. This guy doesn’t even speak for Republican white people in the friggin’ South Carolina Senate anymore. Where does he get off trying to make white people look so clueless and evil?
Of course, keeping as many white people as possible clueless, so we can sleep at night while continuing to be evil, is pretty much the whole premise of the Southern Strategy, and pretty much Marc Thiessen’s job description for his whole slimy life.
I am curious to know more about Thiessen’s family history. The wiki bio says his mother fought in the Warsaw uprising. Nothing on the father except that the parents were doctors in New York City, described as left-of-center.
The reason I ask is that a lot Nazi spawn seem to show up in the Republican Party. Hans von Spakovsky, for ex. The point of the CIA bringing Nazis into the US after WWII was to push ethnic communities to the political right, as well as have a reservoir of fascists for future use against countries in the Warsaw Bloc.
I suspect there are some things in Thiessen’s family tree missing
from his wiki bio. Just a suspicion, but these guys keep showing up, not surprising since it is estimated that tens of thousands of Nazis and fascists were brought in under various CIA programs.
Should answer your question in the negative.
That is an award given to his mother seventy years after the fact, after Poland came under the wing of US domination. So the conservative Polish government decided seventy years after the fact to award a left-leaning radical of the forties an award for patriotism? Decades after she left Poland? For what purpose? Who awards the badges of honor speak loudly.
And it says nothing about his father. Remember Hans von Spakovsky’s parents fled the Nazis in 1951 and settled next door to Nazi rocket scientists in Huntsville, Alabama. How’s that story standing up for you?
We know that the CIA imported tens of thousands of Nazis into the US after WWII. What happened to them and their children? Certainly, becoming a conservative blowhard propagandist isn’t a terrible stretch.
But no, your post hasn’t answered anything. What did his father do during the war? What was his name? Where did he come from?
Polish Assistance, Inc.
Board Members:
Warsaw uprising was in 1945. Some participants may have been both anti-Nazi/Germany and left-wing, but anti-Nazi/Germany and anti-communist/USSR may have been as much or more prevalent.
My guess (based solely on profession, name, age, and location) is that she was married to Dr. Eugene Thiessen who was a prominent NYC surgeon and could easily be described as socially/politically as liberal. If correct, it appears from this that the marriage ended within a few years after Marc was born.
I’m presuming the Ina Thiessen you link to is not Nina. If Eugene is Marc’s dad, then Ina must be a later wife.
I guess Marc Thiessen is just a privileged rich kid from New York who didn’t absorb any of his parents’ liberalism, not another von Spakovsky child of the Nazis. Thanks for the research.
I was curious as well. It’s unusual for anyone of privilege and also has a public profile to be so opaque about his/her birth (or adoptive) family.
(I made the leap that Ina Victor would not be Janina or Nina.)
Once again, please note that a relationship between Janina and Eugene is a guess on my part. Nothing other than the same last name and the Wikipedia entry on Marc that alleges his father was a doctor and leftist links the two together. And that alone says nothing about the nature of a relationship between the two nor if Eugene is the recognized or actual father.
There was a “Janina Teresa Januszowska” who was awarded for her work in WWII. But that person was a Carmelite nun who died in 1946 and couldn’t have been Marc Thiessen’s mother, so if Thiessen or a biographer claims that this is his mother, then it’s a lie.
Also, President Komorowski came to power after the elected leadership of Poland died in an air crash.
The source of Thiessen’s mother’s heroics as far as I can tell was from an article about him in his private school’s newspaper. I don’t know where you got the name, but it appears to be the nun’s name with Thiessen affixed at the end.
I’ve tried to look up her name. I get similar names, like the nun’s, but with the exception of the wording of her award for patriotism in 2010 I can’t find any information on her.
Marc Thiessen, according to his bio, was born in 1967. If his mother was eighteen in 1939 then that’s generally past the fertility cycle of women who were heroes in Warsaw uprising. I suppose it’s possible she was a pre-teen during the Warsaw uprising, but since most of the articles I can find about the award in 2010 refer to the nun, not Thiessen’s mom, I think that this one bit of history sounds like a lie.
Thiessen’s claim that his grandfather died during the Warsaw uprising might be true, but it doesn’t say which side he was on.
These are the times I wish there were genuine, actual investigative reporters still roaming the earth.
oh, fuck this guy in his “our nigras was happy” beautiful mind.