speaks the language of mass extermination while his administration prepares the infrastructure for it. He calls refugees
In recent attacks in Gilroy, El Paso, and beyond, we are seeing the frightful results. The main danger to humanity right now is that he will start a new civil war in the United States that delays effective action on climate change until it is too late.
more than all the other candidates on the stage when she said of white supremacy:
There are two issues facing the world now that are likely to cause massive social dislocation. The first is climate change that makes increasingly large areas of the Earth uninhabitable. The second is the rapid implementation of artificial intelligence to replace large segments of the workforce. Under capitalism, there are strong pressures to deal with both these problems through population reduction by the most brutal methods.
, the white supremacist Trump supporter that murdered 22 people, and injured 25 others at Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso, Texas on Saturday, certainly has that view. In the
, and the rise of white supremacy, the population most targeted for population reduction will be people of color.
Enters Donald Trump. He was put into the White House with the backing of important capitalist oligarchs based on his white supremacist campaign designed to exacerbate racial divisions in the country and bring the most backwards white workers more firmly under their domination with the mythology of white nationalism. The goal of these white nationalists is a United States in which African-Americans are either dead or again in chains. They also want to remove all other people of color. Whether this is Trump's conscious goal may be an open question, but there is no question that it is the publicly espoused goal of some of Trump's
Trump spent the first two years of his presidency completing the conversion of the Grand Old Party into the party of white nationalism. The announcement this week by
, along with six others, signals that that task is near completion. Trump has also been packing the federal courts with white supremacist judges and justices, and tightening the grip of his fascist cabal on executive power in the most powerful country in the world. Even now he is putting the finishing touches on that by replacing
, another sycophant. Ratcliffe was the sycophant that helped Trump overturn Obama's limitations on surplus military equipment going to the police under the 1033 program. Only seven months into his presidency, he worked with Ratcliffe to renew the acquisition of weapons of war by those who police communities of color. In the context of the present discussion, this should also be seen as a step preparing the infrastructure for mass extermination.
Now, increasingly, Trump speaks the language of mass extermination while his administration prepares the infrastructure for it.
is a word Trump likes to apply to non-white people. The Israeli news site
It also highlighted the hypocritical silence of many American Jews and Republicans, writing:
One reason Haaretz felt the need to come to Cummings's defense is that he has been a consistent friend of Israel in Congress, and through his
(ECYP), has sent more than 200 high school students from Baltimore to an elite two-year fellowship in Israel.
They say every cloud has a silver lining. Following Trump's racist attacks on the four progressive congresswomen of color,
and downplayed it as a broader campaign against all people of color. For example,
As Issac remembers it, Trump came down the escalator to announce his candidacy by complaining that Leftists were bringing drugs, bringing crime, were rapist, etc., and then made a ban on socialist entering the US one of the first acts of his presidency.
When Trump tells the four congresswomen of color to go back where they came from,
slogan yelled at him, and other antiwar protesters, in the '60s. Missing is any consciousness of the
calls for, and even plans for, the sending of all African Americans back to Africa that began shortly after slavery was ended, and have been a part of white American culture ever since. Naively, he
In the first place, Trump is waging an electoral campaign based on racism. He isn't just vilifying the opposing party. He is vilifying all people of color by proxy. That's why he goes after
, who actually claims to be a socialist. He is making his appeal almost exclusively to white voters. Both of these Leftist writers see socialism, and the progressive movement, meaning themselves, as the main target of Trump's attacks. They seem to be saying that while Trump mobilized racism in his attack on the Squad, the main reason for his attack is their progressive politics and support for the Palestinian cause. On the other hand, Cummings has not only been a friend to Israel, he's been
, so I hope one of the silver linings of this attack is to clarify that while Trump will red-bait people on the left, the primary target of these attacks is all people of color. He is basing his electoral campaign on white racism; anti-communism plays a relatively minor role.
didn't need to wait for the Cummings attacks to call out Trump for using language
They were right to protest Trump's racist tweet. His language was parroted by the El Paso white terrorist. In his manifesto, he said of the Democrats:
, in which the Hutu government annihilated 75 percent of the Tutsi population, a million people, in just a hundred days, was preceded by a radio station pushing propaganda that referred to the Tutsis as
was one of three white supremacists from rural Kansas found guilty of a 2016 plot to slaughter Muslim refugees living in a Garden City apartment building. In expressing their genocidal hatred they referred to Muslims as
The three terrorists were all Trump supporters, and at trial they asked the judge to consider Trump's rhetoric as a mitigating factor. In court filings,
The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president.
Trump should be charged as a co-defendant in all these attacks. Last month
Trump retweeted British white nationalist
Katie Hopkins, who has
referred to immigrants as
“cockroaches,” called a black man a
“jiggaboo” in a tweet, and
called for a
“final solution” for Muslims. This is a worldwide white supremacist movement we are facing, and they are deadly serious.
The Language of Mass Extermination
Long before Trump said
“The Democrat Congresswomen have been spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said” and asked
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” or said
“Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place." he had adopted a coded vocabulary that links people of color to dirt, filth, and infestations:
“filthy and hate laced” “OBAMACARE A ‘FILTHY LIE" “Ebola infested areas of Africa” “@BarackObama hasn't done shit” "this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept." "the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S." and so on.
When Trump speaks of
“festations” and uses allusions to
“dirty,” and
“filthy” when referring to people of color, he is more than just dehumanizing us. He is tapping into very deep-rooted fantasies in which darker-skin people are associated with feces.
Trump also has a habit of referring to immigrants as
“animals” who are
“invading” the United States. This is what he
said during an immigration roundtable at the White House, 16 May 2018:
We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in -- and we’re stopping a lot of them -- but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.
Later he said that he was just calling
MS-13 gang members animals. This is not true. What is true is that he consistently uses the
“Made in the USA” El Salvadorian gang to demonize all Latino immigrants.
Trump is not alone in promoting this language of extermination. On
Fox News,
Tucker Carlson has complained that immigration
“makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided,” and said of the Southwest,
“thanks to illegal immigration, huge swaths of the region are covered with garbage and waste that degrade the soil and kill wildlife."
When he has Trump on the show we get a double dose of the coded racism, as in this exchange from
“Tucker Carlson Tonight,” 1 July 2019. To these white nationalists, diverse ethnicity is the problem. They argue each race or ethnicity should live in its own country. The unspoken, but understood, subtext to this conversation is that Japan is pretty much a single ethnicity nation, and the US is not.
{never mind we won the war!😎}
CARLSON: You’ve come to where we are now Osaka or Tokyo and the cities are clean. There's no graffiti. No one going to bathroom on the street. You don't see junkies.
TRUMP: It's very nice, isn't it?
CARLSON: Very different from our city.
CARLSON: Some of our cities, but New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles - they've got a major problem with --
TRUMP: It's very sad.
CARLSON: With filth. Why is that?
...
TRUMP: You can't have what's happening -- where police officers are getting sick just by walking the beat. I mean, they're getting actually very sick, where people are getting sick, where the people living there living in hell, too.
Although some of them have mental problems where they don't even know they're living that way. In fact, perhaps they like living that way. They can't do that. We cannot ruin our cities. And you have people that work in those cities. They work in office buildings and to get into the building, they have to walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago. {when Obama was president 😎}
Probably, they picture the police officers and office workers as
“white,” and the
“filth” as not. Filth is, of course, their coded reference to the homeless and downtrodden in our cities. Then Trump threatens to take action to
“clean up” this
“filth”:
TRUMP: So, we're looking at it very seriously. We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up. It's inappropriate.
Now, we have to take the people and do something. We have to do something.
It's not hard to imagine that in the not-to-distance future the Trump administration will try to re-purpose the concentration camps they are now creating for immigrants, to move the homeless, and other undesirables, off the streets of US cities. There is already
talk along those lines on right-wing message boards, if that's what
quora is these days.
Author
Joel Kovel addressed some of the deeper cultural and psychological aspects of this question in his classic work
“White Racism A Psychohistory”:
Racism abstracts the color of the living body into non-colors of extreme value, black and white. Within this organization black represents the shade of evil, the devil's aspect, night, separation, loneliness, sin, dirt, excrement, the inside of the body; and white represents the mark of good, the token of innocence, purity, cleanliness, spirituality, virtue, hope. p.232
On very deep psychological level our mental understanding of what is
“dirty” or
“filthy” develops from the infant's first fascination with, and then learned rejection of, its own feces. Nothing is dirtier than shit, and everything we regard as dirty or filthy has a mental association with shit. Because this in bound up with our experience as infants, and is both presexual and preverbal, it operates at the deepest psychological level, although it deeply influences the development of these later stages.
It is likely that we are predisposed to see sex as
“dirty” because of the proximity of primary sex organs to the anus on the human body, and there is no need to elaborate on the wide role that references to feces play in our languages, but the
“dark psychic” connections to much else in our world is generally well hidden. Kovel reveals
much of how this has been used to support white supremacy in the above cited work:
We have been talking of dirt, which represents a set of peculiar fantasies based upon bodily experience. The central aspect of bodily experience upon which this tissue of daydreams rests is, of course, the act of defecation, and the central symbol of dirt throughout the world is feces, known by that profane word with which the emotion of disgust is expressed: shit. Furthermore, when contrasted with the light color of the body of the Caucasian person, the dark color of feces reinforces, from the infancy of the individual in the culture of the West, the connotation of blackness with badness.
...
Thus, the root symbol between the idea of dirt and the blackness of certain people is that highly colored, strongly odored, dispensable and despised substance which the human body produces so regularly. How strange that this substance—which, after all, knows the body on the most intimate terms. and which is, aside from the pathogenic bacteria occasionally associated with it (another piece of reality immaterial to the life of fantasy), is certainly innocuous enough—should have received the brunt of such contempt and rage. Almost as peculiar is the general reluctance to come to realistic grips with those distortions of the world which so clearly derive in part from their symbolic association with feces. This reluctance is evident even in those who study racism, as shown by the fact that only two articles were found in a survey of the psychiatric literature on prejudice that dealt with this theme in an explicit way: a paper by Lawrence Kubie, in which the idea of the fantasy of dirt which he had proposed in 1938 was developed into a theory of prejudice roughly similar to our dynamic schema of aversive racism, and James Hamilton’s essay “Some Dynamics of Anti-Negro Prejudice,” a review article on prejudice in the presumably compendious American Handbook of Psychiatry failed to even mention the theme.
By and large, connections between feces and the various symbolic organizations with which it is associated remain deeply repressed. The substance itself is abhorred, although the word, shit, is used freely enough; but for the rest, the connection is mediated through the more remote, and hence less threatening, symbols of dirt. p 88-89
The white supremacist casts
“white” people as clean, and everyone else as dirty. They are the enlightened ones. Everyone else is below them, closer to shit, by virtue of skin color. The truth is that humans were Africans before we lived anywhere else. As we moved further north, our skin became lighter so that we could still produce enough vitamin D to survive in the available sunlight. But nobody lost all color and became white, like the whites of all human eyes, and nobody called themselves
"white" before the English settlers in North America started enslaving Africans less than 400 years ago. Now, we get vitamin D from many foods, and light-skinned people can apply sunblock to be safe in the lower latitudes, so it doesn't matter, but the skin color differences linger on, and much mischief has been made with those difference long after they had outlived their prehistoric purpose.
Kovel also noted how the rise of capitalism changed our perception of shit:
Excrement had held an ambivalent fascination for men throughout their history. In agricultural societies, Mumford notes, feces used in manuring had a religious, life-giving quality. Their very sacredness was the token of ambivalence: what is sacred has magical power, but is also to be avoided, shunned, even considered disgusting. This intense ambivalence toward excrement is apparent in numerous myths and practices, and coalesced in medieval Europe, as Brown observed, into the myth of the Devil. It was the excremental Devil whom Luther invested with all the corporeal evil of the world; and it was from this symbolic turning point that anality spread, by repression, sublimation and abstraction, onto the entire cultural world. “A new stage in the history of the money complex begins in modern times, with the Reformation and the rise of capitalism.” p.149
The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled
And speaking of the devil, I think the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to use his lightly-colored skin to fraudulently claim the label
“white” for himself. White is the color of Sunlight. White is the sum of all colors. White carries with it the intrinsic values of purity, neutrality, enlightenment, and so forth. The
“white” man is none of these, but neither is he really the color white. That didn't stop the English from
claiming the label “white” for themselves and their European fellows after they
started enslaving Africans in North America a little over three hundred years ago.
Not long after the English started calling themselves
“white,” circa 1690, they started calling the Africans
“black,” and they used the darker skin-color of the Africans, and others, to make an association with these infantile
“dirt” fantasies. This may be the second greatest trick the devil ever played, because it has formed one of the most profound, deepest, and therefore most intractable, foundations of white supremacy. It operates at such a deep level, truly preverbal, that most people don't even realize, or acknowledge, that they are making these associations, but that is exactly what Trump is tapping into with his comments about
“shit-hole” countries,
“crime infested” places,
“filthy” and
“disgusting” and such. Here, the nexus between Trump's word and actions couldn't be clearer. When you have an infestation, you call the exterminator.
While Trump talks the language of genocide, his administration is using an immigration crisis it largely created, to justify the building of concentration camps. It tries keep any public knowledge of what it is doing to a minimum, while using the occasional
“reveals” to acclimate that public to the inhumane treatment of people of color by its government. And now he has brought back the federal death penalty. That some of his unhinged supporters should
“get ahead of the program,” as we have seen recently in Gilroy and El Paso, may be unintended, but it certainly is a predictable consequence of the overall direction he is pointing.
More allusions to feces: Rat Infestations and Genocide
 |
WWII German Nazi poster aimed at Rus- sians. Caption reads “Jews, like rates are consuming the well being of your nation.” |
|
Kovel uses
Albert Camus' The Plague to
discussion the relationship between rats and feces, sewers and cities, in our cultural subconscious:
As they do so they come upon darkness, the antithesis of light, and equally ambivalent. For, just as light can represent both the burning of matter and the soft material glow, so does darkness represent both the condition of death, or separation, and of sleep, or reunion. Light and dark are only graduations of energy in nature, neither good nor evil in themselves, except as they have become split apart and worked upon by the forces of the plague: then they represent men's power, their illusions, their despair and their disgust. Here the specter of anality intrudes again upon the stage of history. People die, “in a stench of corruption.” Plague dehumanizes both life and death and drives each to equally false extremes of cold efficiency or fecal disgustingness. This latter aspect is symbolized by the rats, which are the concrete harbingers of the plague. Rats are, as Freud taught us, virtually universal symbols for feces. In Oran, as the plague announces its return to open form, the rats would be found “piled in little heaps” all over the city. . . . “People out at night would often feel underfoot the squelchy roundness of a still warm body. It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.”
Rats are in actuality but a form of life too, as worthy as any other. But they have been made, by their association with the sewers of the cities of men, into the representations of the products of the sewers of the bodies of men—their intestines and their fecal outpourings—and so into the symbolic carriers of our emotional plague, as well as the biological host of Pasteurella pestis. It is men who have made the sewers of their cities; and it is the presence of these city-bodies, and the guilt entailed in them, that gives symbolic, disgusting force to the fantasy of dirt and bodily filth. The historical nexus generates from itself dark fears of dark secondary symbols of filth: shit, rats, human “low-life,” human “trash,” “bums”—untouchables all, our running historical sores, the carriers of plague, or, rather, the projections of our own plague that we flee through abstraction or by the idolatry of washday miracles.
In America, in Oran, in Nazi Germany—the plague has long been with the West, since, in fact, medieval times, when both Pasteurella pestis and universal disgust took hold of our civilization. As sewage has been kept underground and sent out to sea to forestall the biological plague, so has the historical plague been put underground, forced out to sea and onto foreign shores. p. 169-170
Thinking of that last sentence, it is interesting to note that the US conducted a particularly racist and genocidal war in Vietnam, at the same time it was granting unprecedented civil rights to African Americans. The racists, who could no longer be allowed the most overt expressions of racism in the United States, were given an outlet to vent against the
“gooks.”
 |
| Scott Camil, 1971 |
In 1971 a number of Vietnam veterans testified about some of their experiences in the war at the
Winter Soldier Investigation held by antiwar activists in Detroit, MI. These interviews can be seen in my
Vietnam: American Holocaust [
available on Prime Video] The veterans
speaking below are
Scott Camil and
Kenneth Campbell.
Campbell served with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam. Camil served with the Marines from 1965 to 1969, earning two Purple Hearts, Combat Action Ribbon, two Presidential Unit Citations, Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal with three stars, Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star, Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm Leaf, and Vietnam Campaign Medal during two tours in Vietnam. He returned most of his metals after his service. WARNING! If you are naive about the way the US wages war, this may shock you:
CAMIL: It wasn't like they were humans. We were conditioned to believe that this was for the good of the nation, the good of our country, and anything we did was okay. And when you shot someone you didn't think you were shooting at a human. They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay.
CAMPBELL: The Vietnamese were gooks. We didn't just call the VC or the NVA gooks. All Vietnamese were gooks and they were slant eyes. They were zips. They were Orientals and they were inferior to us. We were Americans. We were the civilized people. We didn't give a shit about those people.
CAMIL: In Operation Stone we were sitting up on the railroad trestle with a river on each side. There's another company behind each river. And like the people were running around inside. And we were just shooting them and the newspaper said Operation Stone like World War Two movie. We just sat up there and wiped them out, women, children, everything. Two hundred ninety-one of them.
When Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, some white soldiers in Vietnam celebrated by raising the Confederate flag. Later, some of these bigots would serve as the initiators and backbone of
right-wing militias that formed up in the wake of the Vietnam war, and are still with us today.
On Background
Although it's possible Trump stumble on these racist and genocidal memes by his own corrupt instincts, it's also possible that he is a more astute student of history than he generally lets on.
According to his ex-wife
Ivana Trump, Trump
“kept book of Adolf Hitler's speeches in his bedside cabinet.” The book
“My New Order,” was given to him by friend
Marty Davis, and Ivana said that from time to time her husband would read it. Apparently, he learned something from it. Some have even claimed to see imitations of Hitler's hand gestures in his speaking style.
Even more disturbing is the support for these racist themes among those euphemistically referred to as
“his base,” as exampled by the thirteen-second chant of
“Send her home” that he instigated and then basked in at an almost all-white rally in SC.
All of this is on background. It shows that Trump's use of certain words, the images he seeks to create whenever he disparages people of color, are skillfully designed to dehumanized people of color and stoke racial hatred. While the power of these words is by no means hypnotic, they do operate at a much deeper level than most people subjected to them realize. At the same time it allows its purveyors to deny that there is any racial content to their attacks at all. While this strategy is designed to gently move that minority of the public towards a white nationalist mindset, one possibly unintended consequence is that unstable supporters will be provoked to carry out individual acts of white terrorism, as we have seen.
While proponents of this particular tactic see it as
“excitative violence,” it may actually be the movement's undoing. Hence the provisional designation of this consequence.
Enter the Lone Rangers
Brenton Harrison Tarrant, is the Trump supporter that
murdered 50 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday Prayer on 15 March 2019. A self-identified white racist,
Tarrant sees Trump as
“a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” and thought his 2016 election victory
“simply one of the most important events in modern history.” No old school right-winger, he is ultra-nationalistic, anti-Western, anti-free market, Green, and racist. He is also a
Putin/Dugin fanboy, and a supporter of their project to create a
“European homeland” that stretches from Siberia to Ireland, and then some.
He left a
87-page manifesto titled
“The Great Replacement.” Far from the ravings of a lunatic, this essay may be one of the clearest, most lucid, descriptions of the overall goals, methods, and logic of what has become a worldwide white supremacist movement. The title is one of the most
basic themes of the worldwide white nationalist movement. They so identify with the synthetic category
“white race,” and let the fear that identity is being lost by integration with an increasing number of people of color, that they let that fear dominate their lives. Because of this, he says:
We must crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil. It is not just a matter of our prosperity, but the very survival of our people.
They also replay this theme with the ominous sounding
“White Genocide” meme, although they are the ones with murder on their minds, as exampled by Tarrant's conscious, and in his view - self-sacrificing, putting of words into action with his terrorist rampage. He gave as the reason for his action that
infamous fourteen-word fascist phrase:
We must ensure the existence of our people, and a future for white children.
Although his attack took place in New Zealand, his manifesto makes clear its primary aim was
“to further the social, cultural, political and racial divide within the United States.” That dictated his decision to use gun violence. He sees himself as part of a worldwide white nationalist movement. Not a lone wolf, but part of a pack.
Dylan Roof, who murdered nine African Americans in a Charleston, SC church, inspired him, and he claims
Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who murdered 77 to oppose Muslim immigration, blessed his attack beforehand.
Tarrant said
“Kill High Profile Enemies,” then named German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, Turkish PM
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and London Mayor
Sadiq Khan. All are also disliked by Trump.
Tarrant wants to see the US divided up along racial lines:
This balkanization of the US will not only result in the racial separation of the people within the United States ensuring the future of the White race on the North American continent, but also ensuring the death of the ‘melting pot’ pipe dream …
He targeted Muslims because they
“were an obvious, visible and large group of invaders, from a culture with higher fertility rates..." Oddly enough, he claimed to have made the
“attack in the name of diversity,” because its goal was to
“ensure diverse peoples remain diverse, separate, unique, undiluted...”
He focused his attacks on Muslims because
“They are the most despised group of invaders in the West, attacking them receives the greatest level of support.” He opposes immigration because:
Mass immigration and the higher fertility rates of the immigrants themselves are causing this increase in population. We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history. Millions of people pouring across our borders, legally...This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people...We must crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil. It is not just a matter of our prosperity, but the very survival of our people.
He also used the lack-of-space argument to oppose immigration, and claimed it is the answer to the dilemma posed by climate change:
[T]he environment is being destroyed by overpopulation, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not overpopulating the world. The invaders are the ones overpopulating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.
He seemed to justify the Trump administration's attitude towards immigrant children:
Children of invaders do not stay children, they become adults and reproduce, creating more invaders to replace your people. They grow up and vote against your peoples own wishes, for the interests of their own people and identity.
...
Any invader you kill, of any age, is one less enemy your children will have to face.
And yet, he knows how to play the populist card, complaining about
“corporate profits” and
“the ever increasing wealth of the 1% that exploit the people for their own benefit.”
Like Trump, he blames immigrants for the
“rape and molestation perpetrated by these non-white scum.” Trump strongly opposes any sanctuary given to refugees of color. Tarrant warns
“if you try to hide these rapist scum we will kill you as well.”
He suggests dirty tricks that would make Russia's Internet Research Agency, or
Roger Stone, proud:
Incite conflict. Place posters near public parks calling for sharia law, then in the next week place posters over such posters calling for the expulsion of all immigrants, repeat in every area of public life until the crisis arises.
Even though he is an Australian fascist who committed his white terrorist act in New Zealand, he focuses on the US because:
Civil war in the so called “Melting pot” that is the United States, should be a major aim in overthrowing the global power structure and the Wests’ egalitarian, individualist, globalist dominant culture.
He was trying to create precisely the situation that will doom any effective leadership to combat climate change by the most advanced technological country:
The United States is in turmoil, more so that at any other time in history. States hate other states, the electoral college is under attack at every turn and the races are at each other's throats. On top of this is a two party political system, split by racial, social, cultural, linguistic and class divides.
The end result is a nation in gridlock, unable to respond to any great change, unable to commit to any great projects. A political and social stalemate that makes any advancement impossible.
After Tarrant's attack, New Zealand's Prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern made an appeal to international leaders to fight online extremism that is the
Christchurch Call. Australia, Canada, European Commission, France, Germany, Indonesia, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Senegal, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom signed it. United States did not. Donald Trump
refused, citing
“free speech” concerns.
Tarrant live streamed his attack on Facebook, and published his manifesto because he wanted to inspire copycats. Six weeks after the Christchurch terror, on 27 April 2019, another white supremacist terrorist, 19-year-old
John T. Earnest, entered the Chabad of Poway synagogue in
Poway, California and open fired with an AR-15 style rifle. He killed one person, and injured 3 others. Like, Crusius, he made a post to 8chan, an extreme right-wing message board, before the attack. It was a racist and anti-Semitic letter that blamed Jews for
“white genocide.” He said he was inspired by the Christchurch mosque attack, and Tarrant's
“The Great Replacement" manifesto.
This attack took place exactly six months after the
Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, 27 October 2018. In that terrorist attack
Robert Gregory Bowers, 46, shot up the Tree of Life synagogue. He killed eleven people and injured seven more. He attacked them because they were Jewish, and because they were helping immigrants. Just before the attack he posted
this message:
“HIAS (formerly, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society - ed) likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in.”
Not just for fringe elements anymore
These really crazy white supremacist conspiracy theories aren't just for fringe elements like Nazis, KKK, or individual actors like Tarrant anymore. US Representative
Steve King (R-Iowa) was feeling at home enough when being interviewed by the Austrian far-right propaganda site
Unzensuriert to say that
he has read “The Great Replacement,” and thinks it
“completely logical to me that this could come to pass.” He even thinks
George Sores, a favorite target of right-wing conspiracy theories, is financing it!
More importantly, President Trump, himself, has
retweeted “White Genocide” memes about South Africa.
Anything like a complete list of white extremists in the Trump administration is far beyond the scope of this essay, but here is a bit, just to give you the favor:
Mike Anton was Publius Decius, the blogger who argued man has a
“natural affinity for people who look, think and speak like himself,” before he joined Trump's National Security Council.
Sebastian Gorka wore the medal of Vitézi Rend, a Nazi organization, to honor his father, he says. It's been reported that he
swore a lifetime oath to the group, and has
close ties to Hungarian far-right circles. Gorka, a Fox News regular, served for a while as deputy assistant to the president and also has represented the administration on television.
Steve Bannon is another white nationalist that has been in and out of the White House, and been influential either way. He has also run Breitbart.com, the self-describe home of the alt-right, off and on. He's also a
Putin/Dugin fanboy, and does a lot of work with European ultra-nationalist parties.
Stephen Miller, was an aide to Senator
Jeff Sessions, a big white supremacist going way back, before he became Trump's chief speech writer, and architect of his anti-immigration and anti-Muslim policies. A decade earlier, he worked with avowed white supremacist
Richard Spencer, when they were both members of the Duke Conservative Union, to bring anti-immigrant activist
Peter Brimelow to speak at Duke University,
an email reveals.
There is also this, from
Democracy Now on Thursday:
The Southern Poverty Law Center has linked a State Department employee to violent and hateful white nationalist messages posted online under a pseudonym. The SPLC’s Hatewatch project found evidence that U.S. Bureau of Energy Resources foreign affairs officer Matthew Q. Gebert and his wife made regular posts glorifying Nazi soldiers, denying the Holocaust, advocating for ethnic cleansing, spreading anti-Semitic and anti-black conspiracy theories, and glorifying mass murderer Dylann Roof. Gebert also allegedly hosted well-known members of the white nationalist movement at his home in Virginia.
These are but a few examples. Some hold important positions, others, not so much. The point is that they are filling the federal government, at every level, with people committed to making America white again.
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| Cesar Sayoc's van had an anti-immigrant side |
On Monday, Trump
‘Superfan’ Cesar Sayoc was sentenced to twenty years for domestic terrorism. Last fall, he mailed package bombs to those he saw as Trump's enemies. He was heavily influenced by Fox News, his lawyers wrote, he
“began watching Fox News religiously at the gym, planning his morning workout to coincide with Fox and Friends and his evenings to dovetail with Hannity.”
There definitely appeared to be a racial component to Sayoc's madness. A cousin
remembers him using an Italian racial slur in referring to African Americans in 2014, and Gureghian, the general manager of the pizza kitchen he delivered for,
explained why he made him park his white van were it couldn't be seen:
“It was puppets with their heads cut off, mannequins with their heads cut off, Ku Klux Klan, a black person being hung, anti-gay symbols, torchings, bombings, you name it, it was all over his truck.”
On the day his first pipe bomb was discovered, he was tweeting against
Andrew Gillum, the African American Democratic gubernatorial nominee that Trump ally Republican
Ron DeSantis claimed would
“monkey this up.” Savoc's tweets
included memes that portrayed Gillum as a puppet of George Soros. Soros was the first to receive a pipe bomb. Fortunately, none of them exploded.
Curiously, Sayoc appeared to be a Putin fanboy as well. A Facebook account
linked to him spoke often about
“my Russian brothers.” A Twitter account that appears to have belonged to him had a post in July 2016 about
“my brothers in from Russia the great leader Puttins[sic] relatives visiting us today” at a Hard Rock Cafe in South Florida. That spring he heavily pushed Russian themes about Syria, Assad, and the battle against ISIS on his Twitter account.
Santino William Legan, the 19-year old white man who murdered three people of color, and injured a dozen more, in a shooting spree at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, on July 28, 2019, also seemed to be
motivated by racist population reduction theory. Before his rampage, the posted this to his Instagram account:
“Read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?”
Might is Right is a 1890's pamphlet very popular with white supremacists and neo-Nazis. It is full of demonstrably false tripe like this:
From the soles of his feet to the crown of his head-the bones, skin, and flesh of his body-even the grey brain pulp-the electric nerves and tissues — mental ganglia and internal viscera of a man belonging to the African, Mongolian, Semite, or Negrito breeds are all fundamentally different in formation, constituents, and character; from the corresponding anatomical sections in men of Aryan descent.
This is an aside that awaits further investigation/speculation. Might is Right contains a poem named “The Higher Law” that mentions a 'Sandy Hook' twice. I was struck by that:
From Sandy Hook to London tower From Jaffa to Japan, They can take who have the power They may keep who can.
...
From Sandy Hook to London tower, From Greenland to Japan — They will take who have the Power And they may keep who can.
This poem circa 1890, so obviously, it's not a reference to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that occurred on 14 December 2014, but could there possibly be an other-way-round connection? The Wikipedia article on the shooting says that it is unknown “why he targeted Sandy Hook elementary school.” But we do know the shooter, Adam Lanza, studied other mass shootings, including Breivik's racist terror attack in Norway, and Lanza's mother was a paranoid survivalist who collected weapons, so it's quite possible he was familiar with “Might is Right.”
Not a week went by after the Gilroy attack before we suffered another terrorist attack by another white supremacist Trump supporter.
Patrick Crusius is alleged to have massacred 22 people of color in an El Paso, Texas Walmart on Saturday. There is no question about his motives because he posted a
manifesto to 8chan twenty minutes before the attack. It began by letting us know he is a Tarrant copycat, and motivated by Trump's anti-immigrant tirades:
In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.
...
Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.
At times his rhetoric seems to have an almost socialist bent:
The takeover of the United States government by unchecked corporations. I could write a ten page essay on all the damage these corporations have caused,..
Before, veering back into a
Fox News view of Trump's opposition:
They intend to use open borders, free healthcare for illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters. With policies like these, the Hispanic support for Democrats will likely become nearly unanimous in the future.
I said earlier how he saw automation as causing massive unemployment:
So it makes no sense to keep on letting millions of illegal or legal immigrants flood into the United States, and to keep the tens of millions that are already here. Invaders who also have close to the highest birthrate of all ethnicities in America.
and finally:
If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.
....
Our European comrades don’t have the gun rights needed to repel the millions of invaders that plague their country.
Thirteen hours after the El Paso white terrorist attack, there was another terror attack by a lone gunman in
Dayton, Ohio. Although the shooting in front of Ned Peppers in the Oregon District was less than a mile from the Courthouse Square location of the
May 2019 Ku Klux Klan rally, and although six of the
nine people murdered by
Connor Betts, the 24-year old white gunman, were African American, there isn't enough information available at this time to include it in this set of white nationalist terrorist attacks. It may actually be closer to the ordinary
“vanilla” gun violence that regularly troubles the United States. That has its own separate white supremacist components related to the origins of the 2nd Amendment as
a measure to protect slavery, the history of the use of firearms to suppress the Native Americans, African Americans, and other people of color, and the continuing nexus between the National Rifle Association(NRA), and other pro-gun groups, and the white nationalist movement, for starters.
Is our country full?
 |
| The emptiness of America - Source WAPO |
This
“Our country is FULL” argument is also one trumpeted by the US president. Trump gave that as a reason for closing the Southern border in an 9 April 2019
tweet. At a roundtable on the border at the U.S. Border Patrol station in Calexico, Calif. three days earlier,
he spoke as if addressing the refugees directly:
“Can’t take you anymore. Can’t take you. Our country is full. Our area is full, the sector is full. Can’t take you anymore. I’m sorry. So turn around. That’s the way it is.”
The next day, he repeated the theme before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, saying:
“Our country is full, can’t come. I’m sorry.”
Because these statements are patently false, and directed at an
“other,” they are also patently racist without being explicitly so. That sort of thing is a Fox News favorite. While these comments got little noticed in the US, they received a warm welcome in white nationalist circles in Europe. A Facebook posting by the Bad Dürkheim branch of the anti-immigrant
Alternative for Germany (AfD) called Trump a
“realistic man who has the courage to speak the truth.” A user commented,
“Germany is also full.”
In 2014,
Nick Griffin, a Holocaust denier, and former chairman of the far-right British National Party(BNP)
said on the BBC,
“The country's full. We'll shut the door.” “Our country is full" is also
the slogan of the white nationalist
Geert Wilders supporters in the Netherlands.
This kind of rhetoric has a dark history in which claims of overpopulation, or the need for
“living space” for a certain people has been used for ethnic cleansing and genocide. Once white supremacy is marshaled to exclude a group from the human family, the claim that there is simply no space for them can be used to justify excluding, or even exterminating them.
Conspiracy is the 2001 HBO dramatic recreation of the high-level Nazi meeting that took place just outside of Berlin on 20 January 1942, and known as the Wannsee Conference. The purpose of that hour-long meeting was to determine how the so-called
“Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was to be implement.
Reinhard Heydrich, the main architect of the Holocaust, opened the meeting by using the lack-of-space argument for the industrial scale mass murder they were there to plan:
So, to begin, we have a storage problem in Germany with these Jews.
...
We are standing still in Russia; the Americans have now joined the war. Both of these events, a further drain on our military, our economy, our manpower, our food supply. We cannot store these Jews, emigration is over, and the inevitable solution is what we together, at this table will discuss this afternoon.
Trump isn't just talking the talk of ethnic cleansing, he is also building the physical structures, and specialized armed bodies that could be put to that purpose.:
1.) He is building the secretive concentration camps that are essential for that type of operation.
Trump may be deporting immigrants at a lower rate than Obama because he is more interested in detaining them. Not only is it much more profitable, it builds the infrastructure he can reuse with other populations. The average daily population of immigrant detainees has grown from 34,376 in 2016 to 40,520 in 2018, and is expected to be 45,890 for 2019, as the Trump administration brings more and more detention facilities on-line. In his 2019 budget proposal, Trump is asking to increase the number of detainee beds to 52,000, and the
New York Times is reporting on internal proposals to increase the detention space to 58,500 by re-allocating money to ICE using discretionary funding. Under Trump, both family and child detention have been greatly expanded. The
Marshall Project reports:
Since taking office, the Trump administration’s ramp up of immigration enforcement and the introduction of a zero-tolerance policy for illegal border crossers has resulted in the federal government holding more migrants in detention than ever before. The average number of people in detention on any day has grown by more than 40 percent during Trump’s two years in office.
The use of private detention facilities has been greatly expanded. According to federal government data, 60% are now detained in private facilities. ICE uses over 630 detention sites throughout the US, and often shuffles prisoners between them. These tend to be remote locations, making public oversight difficult, and deniability possible. Already,
24 immigrants have died in ICE custody since Trump took office. Who knew?The
American Immigration Council reported:
Detention in privately operated facilities and in remotely located facilities was common. About 48 percent, 26 percent, and 22 percent of detainees were confined at least once in a facility that was located more than 60 miles, 90 miles, and 120 miles away, respectively, from the nearest nonprofit immigration attorney who practiced removal defense.
 |
| US Immigration Detention Facilities: Black=Privately-Operated Red=County- & City-Operated Gray=Bureau of Prisons/ICE Blue=ICE |
2.) He is also building up the necessary
“special forces,” of racially motivated, fascist minded personnel that the mass apprehension and detention of people of color will require.
Early in his presidency, Trump reversed Obama administration policy designed to limited the kind and quantity of surplus military hardware going to the police. At the same time, he has openly promoted police violence.
They have greatly expanded ranks of both ICE and the Border Patrol. The patrol has about 20,000 agents, and is a part of the broader U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
Last month,
ProPublica exposed a secret border patrol Facebook group where agents joked about migrant deaths and posted sexist memes. The three-year-old group had roughly 9,500 members,
including border patrol chief
Carla Provost. This report has given us an important window into the culture of these agencies and raises the question of whether the Trump cabal is trying to grow those forces into the type of ideology motivated
“Einsatzgruppen” forces necessary for ethnic cleansing?
 |
| What did Trump administration expect to achieve by releasing this photo? |
3.) He is acclimating the public to a US government that treats people of color in custody with extraordinary brutality. Even the
"exposes" about the way refugees are being treated serve the purpose of normalizing that brutality. The very government that calls them
“animals,” keeps them in over-crowded cages, with no sanitation, no showers or change of clothing, and then displays them after months of such treatment as if to say
“see, animals.” This is the United States government doing the propaganda of extermination.
Although these three things are necessary for their larger
“white America” project, the Trump cabal is using the anvil of immigration crisis to forge these tools now.
US has committed genocide before
 |
| Scenes from Vietnam: American Holocaust |
From the 1830 Indian Removal Act to the Vietnamese and Korean Wars, the US has a history of carrying out genocidal operations against people of color. In just the last century, the US military killed between three and four million Vietnamese, mainly women and children, and they called them
“gooks” while they did it. They killed a similar number in Korea. Recently, Trump
mused ominously about committing mass murder on an international scale by killing a million people a day in Afghanistan.
“If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people. Does that make sense to you? I don’t want to kill 10 million people. I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth. It would be gone… and I don’t want to go that route.”
All Afghans have
been justifiably outraged.
Rana Momand, an Afghan American,
tweeted:
“Can some1 tell #DonaldTrump in order to wipe Afg off the face of the earth, he must get rid of 32 million Afghans, not just 10 mil.” Rangin Dadfar Spanta, a national security adviser for former President
Hamid Karzai,
told reporters on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s words were
“a terrible, racist political message.” He added,
“There is no need to brag that you can kill 10 million Afghans.”
What other sitting US president has felt compelled to say, not once, but twice, that he didn't want to kill millions of people? Here Trump sounds like the gangster that threatens
“I hope nothing bad happens to your family.”
Trump is not Hitler
Comparisons between Trump and Hitler can only be taken so far. Still, it is possible that history will find that Trump is far more dangerous, certainly to humanity's future, than Hitler ever could have been. There are a number of reasons for this:
- Hitler built an early version. The Model T of fascism. What Trump could build is far more dangerous.
- Hitler took over a broken industrial power with potential. Trump runs the greatest industrial power on Earth.
- Capitalism had at least another century of viability when Hitler came to power, now humanity might not survive another century of capitalism.
- Trump has weapons of mass destruction and tools of mass surveillance that Hitler could only dream about.
- White supremacy in the US is far more pervasive and endemic than Antisemitism ever was in Germany.
- Pre-Holocaust, Jews were about 1% of the Germany population. African-Americans are 12.1% of the US population.
We now have a president with
the audacity to ask “Why was there the Civil War?”
Since the Civil War ended racial slavery, white supremacy has been like a virus that has been largely dormant in the US body politic. Although largely suppressed, it has regularly broken through to the surface to form an ugly rash on the country, and we know from recently released tapes of
conversations between presidents Nixon and Reagan, Trump is not the first bigot to occupy the oval office in modern times.
But this is the first time, since the Civil War, that a such an openly white supremacist cabal has seized this level of state power with the reactionary purpose of re-establishing the level of white power that was lost in the Civil War. This is the disguised promise of MAGA, and all those deployable
“send her back” chanting Trump supporters know it.
In 1970, Joel Kovel wrote in
“White Racism: A Psychohistory” a warning that resonates even louder today:
Although we cannot predict the future, we can see what is pressing from the past: a coiling spring behind a veil of repression, a gathering cloud of unresolved debts, vapors in the rarefied air of Western abstraction, ready to condense themselves into storms, blowing culture ahead lest that condensation occur. We have seen such storms in this century, and uneasily fear a recurrence we would desperately wish to avoid. We have seen Germany, the most culturally advanced nation in the West, and the most inwardly split, resolve itself under the pressures of history into a regression that still blanches us in horror. We should know by now that Nazism was not a particular problem of the German people, but the general problem of men under the conditions of a civilization such as the modern West. Germany degenerated because of historical contingency, and, fundamentally, because she had gone furthest in progress. and splitting, had pushed herself to that extremity beyond which is the abyss. Now other contingencies arise; and other peoples, further yet to the West, move themselves to an extreme. p.167
If there is one
“take-away” I hope you get from this essay, it is this: US leaders with the most extreme racial views are now consolidating state power in the United States, and while they are doing so, they are also creating the environment, recruiting and training up the forces, and building the infrastructure to take their racial policies to extremes they-themselves may not yet envision.
If they succeed in forcing humanity down this dead-end path, it is quite likely that the clock will have run out on climate change before we can extract ourselves. Game Over! The stakes are that high.
Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!
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