“bark eater”

bark eater : bark n (1987: fr. Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia desc. of Khmer Rouge, see below). One who advocates extreme measures for a cause, often in the form of the dogmatic “single issue voter”or terrorist but more frequently one who has absolute faith in a series of ideological, political or ethical/moral lines in the sand. Bark eaters often plan and execute or voice desire to eliminate and/or humiliate the perceived opposing group(s), including their own.—to be a bark eater about: to behave as a bark eater, to rigidly adhere to a belief and deny and/or disparage reasonable alternatives. —calling out the bark eaters: citing instances of bark eater behavior in a public forum without being a bark eater about it.

— Derek Bridges and G Bitch

From Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia:

The bombers came up from Bangkok like big flying motels, dropping their bombs according to some computer program on all the sanctuaries, then up to where they thought the headquarters might be and all along the Ho Chi Minh supply line.

But instead of driving the Vietcong back, Operation Breakfast had the opposite effect. It drove them further into the Cambodian jungles where they hitched up with this weird bunch of rednecks called the Khmer Rouge, run by Pol Pot along with Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary. They had been educated in Paris in the strict Maoist doctrine, except someone threw a perverse little bit of Rousseau into the soup.

This made for a strange bunch of bandits, hanging out in the jungle living on bark, bugs, leaves, and lizards, being trained by the Vietcong. They had a back-to-the-land, racist consciousness beyond anything Hitler had ever dreamed of. But they had no scapegoat other than the city dwellers of Phnom Penh. They were like a hundred thousand rednecks rallying in New Paltz, New York, ninety miles above the City, about to march in.

Spalding Gray. Decidedly not a bark eater.