|
Jesse Helms was buried yesterday,
My mother raised me not to speak ill of the dead, but she also excited in me an interest in history, which often means speaking ill of many dead people, either incompetents with good intentions or utterly evil men like Hitler, Belgian’s King Leopold or Louis XIV.
Over the years, I have come to resolve this seeming contradiction in what my mother taught me to mean that it’s just good taste to allow a period for those who were close to the departed and loved him as a person to mourn, and more specifically to wait until he is buried.
That done, let us begin to examine Helms’ legacy
To call Jesse Helms conservative is a testament to how that word has become the most abused in the American political lexicon. A conservative is a person who believes in free enterprise, low taxes and small government, which Helms did, but also in civil liberties and personal freedom, which Helms did not. Jesse Helms was not a conservative.
We can dismiss out of hand that he had any belief in democracy. Helms believed that government should reflect a social hierarchy based on talent. Of course, in Helms’ view white males had more talent than anybody else. He supported hard line segregationist candidates for public office, once warning with alarm that an opponent to Helms’ favored candidate endorsed “the mingling of the races.” Helms became a bitter critic of the University of North Carolina for its supposed “liberal” views, once calling it the “University of Negroes and Communists.” He was elected to the Senate many years after segregation had ended, although Helms continued to support the Old South’s peculiar institutions and never tired of denouncing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a member and later chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms was a champion of Apartheid in South Africa.
Helms embraced wholeheartedly pseudo-scientific studies like The Bell Curve that argued for the inherent intellectual inferiority of blacks to whites. He also said, “crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a facts of life.” As far as Helms was concerned, any black who asserted the equality of all members of the human race or equal rights for his people was a Communist, and stood by specific, albeit baseless, accusations of Communism against Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. O Joe McCarthy, thou art mighty yet.
Helms liked to say he wasn’t a racist and wanted what was best for all Americans. One could believe that, if one could believe the worst thing that ever happened to Afro-Americans was the emancipation of the slaves or the end of Jim Crow.
On women’s issues Helms was an old fashioned male supremacist who considered a woman’s proper function to be the bearing and raising of children. He opposed abortion rights, naturally, and routinely voted against equal pay legislation.
Another group that Helms found inherently inferior is gay people. Helms, whose morality was conflated with his personal reading of the Bible, was afraid that if America did not fight homosexuality it would go the way of Sodom and Gomorrah. Defying all scientific evidence and common sense, he asserted that AIDS was caused by homosexual behavior and opposed all federal funding for research into the disease. During a Senate debate he once said, "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." However, Helms did a partial turnaround late in his career when he voted for funding AIDS treatment in Africa, where the disease is spread mostly by heterosexual relations.
Helms never saw a right wing dictator he didn’t like. He was an ardent supporter of the brutal Chilean dictator, Agusto Pinochet. He was one of the few members of Congress to bemoan the downfall of the corrupt Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, whose usefulness even to the American far right had dissipated long before. He supported Latin American rightist death squads and said the late Major Roberto Dabuisson, chief of El Salvador’s murderous right wing paramilitary in the 1970s, “represents the principles of the Republican party in the US.” Personally, I was unaware that any but the very worst Republicans – that is to say, Helms – believed the principles of the Republican party to include armed thugs kicking down doors in the middle of the night and murdering entire families. Even under Bush and Cheney, this isn’t exactly commonplace.
Helms was not a conservative. He was a right wing kook who saw government and society as properly organized into a top-down hierarchy based on race, gender and religion. He was a crypto-fascist who thought that government and individuals were justified in using violence to keep racial minorities, gays, working women, and political dissidents oppressed.
Unfortunately, his malicious influence shaped the face of Republican Party for a generation. Real conservatives made an alliance with Helms and were all too easy about doing so, and in the process succumbed to the misleadership of Ronald Reagan, who shared Helms’ jingoistic views on foreign relations and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who not only share Helms’ extreme, mindless nationalism but his cavalier attitude toward civil liberties and human rights. Helms also embraced the modern Republican attitude that corporate profits should not be hindered by concerns about public health and safety or the environment.
Jesse Helms was buried yesterday. I hope someone remembered to drive a stake through his heart before the casket was lowered into the ground.
Were it so simple that we, the living, could all rest in peace now that he is resting.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
