Have I ever mentioned eliminationist rhetoric?*
From Bloomberg:
After a meteoric rise, the investment strategy is being bashed by Republican politicians
ESG is beset from every angle. Republicans want to cancel it. Business leaders are muffling their former enthusiasm. Some money managers have even scrubbed the three letters from their funds.
To meet this fraught moment, brand executives who work with some of the largest US companies, including Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, have had a look — and their message is clear.
ESG proponents need to “punch back hard,” said David Kippen, who runs Evviva Brands in San Francisco and worked with companies including BlackRock Inc. “They can’t just run away.” He declined to comment specifically on BlackRock, which has been singled out by the GOP for its use of ESG strategies. The fanfare and buzz around environmental, social and governance investing that crested about a year ago has given way to a barrage of attacks, raising questions about the staying power of the label. The Republican onslaught, which has been picking up since the spring, gained momentum after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lambasted ESG as “woke capitalism.”
ESG fund managers now find themselves on the backfoot. If the acronym was a type of new technology in what research firm Gartner Inc. calls the “hype cycle,” it’s now perhaps approaching the “trough of disillusionment.”...
....MUCH MORE
As we said in the introduction to November's "Beauty shots: Germany’s Green Party economics minister wants €400,000 for personal photographers":
This is not a good sign. Any time you run into someone who puts façade before substance hold on to your wallet. Ditto for folks who focus more on messaging than on message....
....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....
