14 The Hampton Roads Messenger Your Opinion Matters


Trump Airing this Country’s Dirty Laundry: Embracing of Totalitarianism


BY ANDREW JACKSON


The business mogul, the reality TV star, and, the GOP’s leading


candidate for


president of the United States......he is also a foreign policy disaster waiting to happen. This is also the man that


shamelessly publicly mocked


and a


New York Times investigative


reporter


with a disability, at a rally in South Carolina. This act was a contemptuous reference to a person’s physical


disability.


He did this in such a way as to not only be morally


wrong and


painful to observe, but not to comprehend, at least


not politically.


Trump is no less than a hate-monger, and spreads his message without apology in almost every public encounter in which he finds himself.


I, without apology, describe Mr.


Trump’s actions as nothing less nor more than fear mongering in blaming refugees for the very terror they are fleeing, to say nothing of the fact that it erodes our own civil liberties. He and others, such as Huckabee and


Cruz Christians.


describe I’m


wondering have read Matthew 25:40.


themselves if


as they Trump,


along with a group of Governors, undoubtedly have overlooked the fact that barring a group of refugees from coming into their state because of their nationality or religion would violate the Constitution.


Some in


Trump crossed the line. Well, let me just say it like it is.


the media have said What he


actually did was to clear his politics of arrogance, cynicism, and a deeply ingrained bigotry and racism. As far as I’m concerned, he stepped over the line the moment he announced his candidacy for the presidency. He started off campaigning by calling for followed up his declaration for public office by calling Mexican immigrants violent rapists, gang members, and drug dealers. This would be president also


called for putting refugees in


detention centers and the creation of a data base for them. This sound like the Hitler regime revisited.


The fact is, our historical history of human rights isn’t exactly clean. It wasn’t too long ago with this same kind of fear, we imprisoned U.S. citizens


refused entry to Europe's Jews. Some euphemistically


of Japanese descent, called


these “protective custody.


Beyond Trump being cowardly, he does his dirt in such a way that few people,


including corporate


media and his intellectual defenders, recognize that Trump is symptomatic of the brutal seeds of totalitarian- ism. We have seen these seeds within our boundaries before. We might ask are we just turning over the soil to cultivate these seeds again within our


actions and


“American” society. On the contrary, he signifies how


totalitarianism can mutate and take different forms in specific historical moments. Rather than being dismissed as a wild-card in American politics, we had better recognize that Trump’s popularity


represents a


political space, in both the wider culture and in recent history.


evident not only in his race baiting, but in his increasing support for violence against protesters at his rallies, and his call to “make America great again” by any means necessary, none of which is new to American society or history.


What is new is the degree to which this endorsement of violence, racism, and the call to violate civil liberties


are expressed so visibly


and without apology. How else to explain the muted criticisms, if not almost non-existent public and media response, to his comments


that:


“we’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that


security is going to


rule… And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago. This call to do “the unthinkable” is a fundamental principle of any notion of totalitarian- ism, regardless of the form it takes.


As an example, Trump’s recent call to bring back waterboarding and to support a torture regime far exceeds what might be called an act of stupidity or ignorance. Torture in this


instance becomes a means of


exacting revenge on those considered “Other,” un-American, and inferior— principally Muslims, immigrants, and members of the Black Lives Matter Movement.


And, if history is any indication, it will not stop there.


We have seen this and seen this behavior before in the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and later in the dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s. Donald Trump “may be the first openly fascistic frontrunner for the Republican


presidential nomination but the ground was prepared and the


seeds of his success sowed over the course of many years. We’ve had a fascism undercurrent flowing through the American political bloodstream for quite some time.


This resurfaces


dangerous This is


is a the dark


discourse and


that dangerous


secrets not simply about Trump, but more importantly about the state of American culture and politics. We see it everywhere daily in the supposedly disguised word and phrases that respond to media editorials, in the words used to describe certain people or cultures. of bigotry.


The covert behavior Trump’s brutal racism,


cruelty, and Nazi-style policy recom- mendations are more than shocking, they


are emblematic of totalitarian-


ism’s hatred of liberalism, its call for racial purity, its mythic celebration of nationalism, its embrace of violence, its disdain for weakness, and its anti- intellectualism. This is the discourse of total terror. While we talk of terrorism as if it is something distant and not a part of our history, reality is that its been here for a while.....and home grown. These elements of totalitarian- ism have become the new American normal. The conditions that produced slavery, lynching, the torture chambers, intolerable


violence, extermination


camps, squelching of dissent are still with us. Totalitarianism is not simply a relic of the past. It lives on in new


Mizzou FROM PAGE 1


until president Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized


students’ Amid heightened growing protests, and


WE ARE UNITED!!!!!!,” sophomore defensive back tweeted.


Anthony Sherrils


tensions, national


attention, Wolfe could not escape the pressure of resignation.


“The frustration and anger that I see is clear, real, and I don’t doubt it


experiences.


forms and it is just as terrifying and dangerous today as it was in the past.


an


Trump is not just a fool or idiot,


or ethically dead, he is


symptomatic of a long line of fascists who shut down public debate, attempt to humiliate their opponents, endorse violence as a response to dissent, and criticize any public display of democratic


principles. America has


reached its endpoint with emergence of Trump, and his presence should be viewed as a stern warning of the nightmare to come. This is not the discourse of some distant enemy, but rather of those extremists who have become cheerleaders for Trump’s to- talitarianism.


Trump is not the straight talker as some think he is. He is a monster without a conscience, a politician with a toxic set of policies. He is the product of a form of finance capitalism and a long legacy of racism and violence in which conscience is put to sleep, democracy withers, and public values are extinguished. This is truly a time of monsters and Trump is simply the most visible and certainly one of the most despicable.


everything sleep


Totalitarianism that


and destroys


possible. It is both an ideological poison and a brutal


destroys the elements of democracy. I don’t just


hear Trump but rather see him in the most exacerbated and dramatic forms of totalitarianism’s addiction to tyranny, its attachments to the machineries of death, and its moral emptiness.


is that


What is crucial to acknowledge the


stories, legacies, and


violence that are part of totalitarian- ism’s history must be told over and over again so that it becomes possible to recognize how it appears in new forms, replicated under the banner of terror and insecurity by design, and endlessly legitimated by in the image making of the corporate dis-imagina- tion machines.


Dark times are here but history is


and Trump’s presence— along with his fellow extremists and supporters– should be a rallying cry for a struggle not simply against a crude


open and reactionary popularism,


but against the tyranny of totalitarian- ism, bigotry and racism in its new and offensive forms.


for a second. I take full responsibility for this frustration and for the inaction that has occurred. My resignation comes out of love, not hate,” Wolfe said at his Presidential Resignation Address in early November.


in


This marks the first time decades


that successfully forced


students have the


president


to step down at a major American university.


This is certainly a victory for


the community and student body, but there is certainly much more work to be done in order to overturn the systematic oppression that has been in place for decades at the University of Missouri.


governance and control. It puts reason to


makes politics mode of viable


Volume 10 Number 4


December 2015


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