Civil Liberties and Environment: November 2007 Archives
According to the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, between 1968 and today there were 554 incidents of terrorism perpetuated against the United States domestically and internationally.Last week's FBI report tells us, in the year 2006 alone, with only 12,600 of the nation’s more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies reporting, there were around 7,500 hate crime incidents.
I've never been a big fan of the "hate crime" designation because of worries about the potential for anti-Bushisms to become "hate speech" for example. But one thing seems clear: intolerance is a much greater threat to America than "terrorism."
In the 1930s, many middle-class Germans were dedicated conservationists with regional hiking clubs boasting thousands of local members. The National Socialists didn't just turn Germany into a fascist state over night: they gradually and legally seized power over a period of years. The outcome was not inevitable. As Thomas Lekan notes in his study of environmentalism in the Rhineland region, Imagining the Nation in Nature, it was important to win over the nature-loving demographic during the consolidation of power. In 1935 the Nazis made their dreams come true by passing the national Reich Nature Protection Law and making Germany the most progressive among industrialized nations in regard to landscape planning and conservation, according to Charles Closmann's essay in How Green Were the Nazis?
What does this have to do with us in the United States right now, you ask?
