Allen West is on a roll of sheer crazy right now.
First the Plantation congressman has been on Fox News the past several days lobbing crazy bombs at the president, calling him a "low-level socialist agitator" whose "Marxist demagogic rhetoric" indicates a "Third World dictator-like arrogance."
Does this sound even remotely sane?
That kind of polarizing rhetoric -- which has made West a darling of the Tea Party -- clearly betrays the man's own radicalism. Question: If West is hurling around such loaded epithets, what does that make him?
A simplistic view would say the indication of West's wild words is that he is a fascist, the opposite (very generally speaking) of that which he conjures up as his bogeyman. Of course, almost all of his rhetoric leans in that direction.
Whoa, you say, now you're doing it. You can't call Allen West a fascist!
Well, inside, see some recent evidence that that's exactly what West is -- and why the idea of this man gaining any real power is a scary proposition indeed.
(Also: Did Rep. West just tell us to beat our kids?)
In remarks made to a conservative woman's group in Boca Raton six days ago, West indicated how he wanted the United States to look.
West's model was the original fascist state: the militarized city-state of Sparta.
"In ancient days, the most feared, the most vicious warriors known to man were the Spartans," said West. "Never known to retreat, never known to surrender."
He then told the women that in the militarized city-state of Sparta, it was the women who made the men strong.
"Because the Spartan women at the age of 9 gave up their male sons, and their male sons went into a training that was called the Agoge and they stayed in that training for the next 11 to 12 years," he said. "And when they finally qualified, when they were finally ready to join the ranks of the Spartan army, it was not their father who gave them their cloak and their shield. It was their mother who gave them their shield. And when the Spartan mother gave that young Spartan warrior his shield, she gave him this basic commandment: 'Spartan, here is your shield. Come back wearing this shield or being borne upon it.'"
Be more like Sparta, eh, Mr. West?
Do you know who else praised Sparta and told his people to be more like them?
Yes, of course it was Adolf Hitler, who likened his Nazi soldiers to Spartans and the Russians as the Helots. But then, what warmonger wouldn't look to the Spartans as a shining example of what a society should look like?
Hitler also admired the Spartans' "racial superiority" and another practice of strong Spartan women -- the systematic murder of its weak and deformed children. Here's something Hitler once wrote about Sparta:
Of course, West has never supported that practice, but his ideas of a military state are frightening enough -- and the radical roads that West careens on have very slippery slopes.Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.
-- West also praised another parental model during that same speech: the use of physical abuse.
"Once upon a time back in the old-school way of the women of the church, when you're a little tyke, you really fear," he said. "It was old mothers who would get together and say, 'Boy you better act right or else I'm going to get that switch and I'm going to tell you're mom and she's going to get that belt.' But it was that type of discipline that enabled us to raise men of character, men of courage, men of honor, men of integrity."
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