This piece and yesterday's picture of the San Francisco drug store where everything is locked up except the sunscreen reminded me of some happy time eliminationist rhetoric that was very popular a few years ago, at least in some circles.
First up, from EdSource, March 2, 2022:
Decades of underinvestment in schools, culture battles over bilingual education, and stark income inequality have made California the least literate state in the nation, as Capitol Weekly reported.
Nearly 1 in 4 people over the age of 15 lack the skills to decipher the words in this sentence. Only 77% of adults are considered mid- to highly literate, according to the nonpartisan data crunchers at World Population Review.
In New Hampshire, the most literate state in the country, only about 5 out of 100 lack English reading and writing skills. Its literacy rate hovers near 95 percent.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all,” said Niu Gao, a senior fellow who studies education issues at the Public Policy Institute of California, as Capital Weekly cited. “California in general does not do very well, and you can see this throughout the entire education pipeline.”
“We really haven’t been investing” for decades, she said. “We’ve been underspending the entire time.”
California, currently is sitting on a surplus bigger than many states’ entire budgets, has for years spent less — about 13 percent less — than the national average on K-12 schools. Recent research shows that even high-performing California students score lower on standardized tests than their counterparts in better performing states....
....MUCH MORE
Next up a pretty good definition of eliminationism via Marquette University Law Review:
Eliminationist Discourse in a Conflicted Society: Lessons for America from Africa?
1. The phrase ―eliminationist has been used by David Neiwert, a journalist who has long covered right-wing discourse and action in the United States. Joshua Holland, The Terrorist Threat: Right-Wing Radicals and the Eliminationist Mindset, AlterNet (June 12, 2009), http://www.alternet.org/story/140578/. Niewert credits the phrase to DANIEL GOLDHAGEN, HITLER‘S WILLING EXECUTIONERS: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST (1996). Holland, supra. The book explains the rhetorical mechanisms and socio-economic dynamics that led Germany‘s non-radical majority to acquiesce, then accept the race politics of the Nazi regime. See generally GOLDHAGEN, supra. ―Eliminationism claims a moral purpose, holding that political opponents are ―a cancer on the body politic that must be excised—either by separation from the public at large, through censorship, or by outright extermination—in order to protect the purity of the nation.
That's a footnote!
To repeat:
"―Eliminationism claims a moral purpose, holding that political opponents are ―a cancer on the body politic that must be excised—either by separation from the public at large, through censorship, or by outright extermination—in order to protect the purity of the nation."
The phrase is used in Holocaust and other genocide studies, as here re: the study of the Einsatzgruppen, the Ordnungspolizei "German Order Police" and their henchmen, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the Trawniki Men in the Generalgouvernement in occupied Poland; and in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian SSR.
This was the Holocaust by bullets, the murder of some 1.5 to 2 million people outside the Nazi murder factories system (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka.)
The Holocaust by bullets included the two day killathon of 33,771 souls at Babi Yar outside of Kyiv and the less-well-known Aktion Erntefest (Harvest Festival) outside Lublin Poland when 43,000 were shot to death. Along with the Odessa Ukrainian SSR massacre in 1941 by Germans, Romanian allies and Ukrainian collaborators where over 30,000 people were murdered, those were three of the ten thousand locations across Eastern Europe where populations were simply annihilated in place.
It would also apply to the Hamburg scum in Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and Father Desbois, whose book Holocaust by Bullets notes some of the 1744 slaughter sites his work has uncovered,
I bring up all this history because the use of eliminationist talk is a direct precursor to genocide. Which makes the series of Medium posts by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira back in 2017-2018 so interesting.
The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War
Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win
The next time you call for bipartisan cooperation in America and long for Republicans and Democrats to work side by side, stop it. Remember the great lesson of California, the harbinger of America’s political future, and realize that today such bipartisan cooperation simply can’t get done.
In this current period of American politics, at this juncture in our history, there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago.
In the early 2000s, California faced a similar situation to the one America faces today. Its state politics were severely polarized, and state government was largely paralyzed. The Republican Party was trapped in the brain-dead orthodoxies of an ideology stuck in the past. The party was controlled by zealous activists and corrupt special interests who refused to face up to the reality of the new century. It was a party that refused to work with the Democrats in good faith or compromise in any way.
The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.
California today provides a model for America as a whole. This model of politics and government is by no means perfect, but it is far ahead of the nation in coming to terms with the inexorable digital, global, sustainable transformation of our era. It is a thriving work in progress that gives hope that America can pull out of the political mess we’re in. California today provides a playbook for America’s new way forward. It’s worth contemplating as we enter 2018, which will be a critical election year.....
....MUCH MORE
