Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Monday, August 21, 2017
The Test of Nazism That Trump Failed
The previous post looked at the manner in which many Americans allow themselves to be come white supremacists by default., often as the live their lives in all white neighborhoods and send their children to mostly lily white private schools. They pretend to themselves that they are liberal and open minded, yet go to the polls and vote Republican election cycle after election cycle even as the Republican party pushes an agenda that seeks to disenfranchise minorities and slash the social safety net for the lest fortunate whom they often equate with those with darker skin colors. Donald Trump had an opportunity after Charlottesville to reject racism and Nazism, but failed the test. A column in the New York Times looks at Trump's failure and what it says about both Trump and those who continue to support him. It's a short step from quietly accepting racism and homophobia to Nazism. Here are highlights:
“No. 1, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. No. 2, racism, the least racist person.” So the president said at a news conference in February. These words left me uneasy. A moment ago, as I was looking at photographs of young men in Charlottesville, Va., who were from my home state, Ohio, and thinking about the message “Heil Hitler” on the T-shirt that one wore, it dawned on me why.
I spent years studying the testimonies of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and the recollections of their rescuers. When the rescuers were asked why they did what they did, they usually avoided the question. If they ventured a reply, it was simply to say that they did what anyone would have done. Historians who read sources develop intuitions about the material. The intuition I developed was that people who bragged about rescuing Jews had generally not done so; they were, in fact, more likely to be anti-Semites and racists. Rescuers almost never boast.
I write these lines in Poland, where the Holocaust is present in every absence, in a house where the Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz spent his summers when he was the same age as the young men I see in those photographs.
“We know ourselves,” . . . . “only insofar as we have been tested.”
Until we have been tested, there is no sense in boasting of our goodness; afterward, there is no need. After Charlottesville, President Trump faced an easy test, and failed. When presented with an obvious opportunity to condemn the evil that was and is Nazism, he first waited, then equivocated, then read from a teleprompter, then relativized. He spoke of “very fine people on both sides.”
The Nazi groups that marched in Charlottesville cannot be considered a “side.” When they carry torches, they imitate Nazi rituals. When they perform the call and response of “Trump! Hail” and “Victory! Hail!” they are translating Nazi performances that we know better in German: “Hitler! Heil!” and “Sieg! Heil!” In Charlottesville, American Nazis shouted “Sieg! Heil!” as they passed a synagogue. When the supporters of the alt-right chant that “Jews will not replace us,” they recapitulate the Nazi idea of a world Jewry that stifles the master race and must therefore be removed from the planet. When they shout “Blood and soil,” they repeat a Nazi slogan signifying that races will murder races for land without mercy and forever. These views do not define a “side,” but rather a worldview in which the United States of America, with its Constitution and laws, and with its hard-won daily understandings of rights and responsibilities, would no longer exist.
Hitler and his henchmen strategically defined themselves, from the outset, as a “side,” as the defenders of the system against the other “side,” the left. . . . . In power, Hitler assimilated all opponents to the other “side” and had them sent to camps or killed. When Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, burned, Hitler had already established in his rhetoric that the other “side” was violent, and he used the (false) claim that the other “side” had committed terrorism to bring the German republic to an end.
The president has failed when no failure can be innocent. He has provided American Nazis with three services, for which they have thanked him: He has normalized their ideology; he has excused their actions; and he has given them hope that he will blame his opponents the next time America is struck by terrorism.
A writer for The Daily Stormer (a website that takes its name from the most anti-Semitic newspaper of the Nazi period) called Charlottesville a “Beer Hall Putsch,” referring to an early attempt by Hitler to seize power. The writer’s meaning was that the events in Virginia were an early failure that promises later victory. American Nazis dream of another Reichstag fire, a moment of terror in which the president will show his true colors and his opposition can be crushed.
We might choose to forget these slogans and these events from the years before World War II, but American Nazis remember the history in their own way, and so does President Trump. The Confederate statues he admires are mostly artifacts of the early years of the 20th century, when Hitler admired the United States for its Jim Crow laws, when Mr. Trump’s father was arrested at a Klan rally, before America passed its test. The presidential slogan “America First” is a summons to an alternative America, one that might have been real, one that did not fight the Nazis, one that stayed home when the world was aflame, one that failed its test.
That America might yet become our country. Whether or not it does now depends upon us. We are being tested, and so we will come to know ourselves.
Each of us who supports liberty for all and equality under the law must resist daily the forces that Trump has chosen to embrace. If we fail to do so, we are little better than the "good Germans" who turned a blind eye to Hitler's horrors and genocide.
Are You a "White Supremacists by Default'"?
I truly cannot grasp the mindset where one believes that simply because someone has a differing skin color or religious faith that person is immediately deemed to be "other," if you will, and not entitled to the same civil lights and rights to life. liberty and the pursuit of happiness as oneself. Perhaps I cannot grasp the mindset because my parents were not prejudicial and I went to school at a small school division where we had both African American and American Indian (Onondaga Indians to be specific) who fully participated in school life: band, cheer-leading, sports. I slow danced with a black girl when I was probably around 13 years old (I still recall her name). And while even then I knew in my heart that I was attracted to boys who were "my type" - even though I was in deep denial - I never thought of those who were different as somehow lesser, or not fully human. I do not say any of this to sound self-congratulatory. I simply do not understand the mindset. Perhaps being gay and often targeted by bigots makes one think more of the plight of others. I simply do not know.
All of this said, sadly, such is not the case with white supremacist and Neo-Nazis. Worse yet, by failing to openly condemn those who are racists and bigots, many become white supremacists by default. They allow the hate to spread and continue. A piece in CNN looks at the way in which too many allow themselves to be white supremacists by default. Here are article excerpts (Note: Edward Ball, cited in the article, is the cousin of two of my college fraternity brothers):
Blame President Trump for his tepid moral response. Call the neo-Nazis and white nationalists thugs. Fill your Facebook and Twitter accounts with moral outrage.
But the tragedy that took place in Charlottesville last weekend could not have occurred without the tacit acceptance of millions of ordinary, law-abiding Americans who helped create such a racially explosive climate, some activists, historians and victims of extremism say.
It's easy to focus on the angry white men in paramilitary gear who looked like they were mobilizing for a race war in the Virginia college town last Saturday. But it's the ordinary people -- the voters who elected a reality TV star with a record of making racially insensitive comments, the people who move out of the neighborhood when people of color move in, the family members who ignore a relative's anti-Semitism -- who give these type of men room to operate, they say.
That was the twisted formula that made the Holocaust and Rwanda possible and allowed Jim Crow segregation to survive: Nice people looked the other way while those with an appetite for violence did the dirty work, says Mark Naison, a political activist and history professor at Fordham University in New York City.
''You have to have millions of people who are willing to be bystanders, who push aside evidence of racism, Islamophobia or sexism. You can't have one without the other,'' Naison says.
"We are a country with a few million passionate white supremacists -- and tens of millions of white supremacists by default," he says.
four types of ordinary people who also play a part in the country's racial divisions, Naison and others say:
No. 1: The 'down-low' segregationists
Many of the white racists who marched in Charlottesville were condemned because they openly said they don't believe in integration or racial equality.
But millions of ordinary white Americans have been sending that message to black and brown people for at least a half a century.
They send it with their actions: They don't want to live next to or send their children to school with black or brown people, historians say.
This isn't the Jim Crow segregation that one reads about in the history books. It's the covert or "down-low" segregationist movement that has shaped much of contemporary America since overt racism became taboo in the 1960s, says David Billings, who wrote about growing up white in the segregated South in his memoir, "Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life."
"Across the country, white people withdrew from the 'public' sphere and migrated to 'whites only' suburbs to evade racial integration," Billings wrote. "The word 'public' preceding words like 'housing,' 'hospital,' 'health care,' 'transportation,' 'defender,' 'schools,' and even 'swimming pool' in some parts of the country became code words that meant poor and most often black and Latino. The word 'private' began to mean 'better.'''
This white separatism continues today. . . . "White people in the past century and a half have made a conscious effort to resegregate themselves," says Edward Ball, author of "Slaves in the Family," a memoir about coming to terms with learning his family owned slaves.
"We have to work hard to make our social lives reflect our values, because white people do not choose the company of people of color generally," he says.
The angry white men in Charlottesville were just being open about their white supremacy. Ball says he wasn't surprised by their boldness.
No. 2: Those who say 'yes, but...'
President Trump's critics blasted him for not coming out strong enough against the white racists who marched in Charlottesville. Trump initially denounced the "egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides." It was the "many sides" qualifier that infuriated some people. They wanted an unequivocal denunciation of racism from a leader.
Trump's "many sides" response, though, wasn't that abnormal in the context of US history. It used to be the norm for white political leaders to draw a moral equivalence between racists and those who suffered from their acts of brutality, historians say.
That "yes, but" approach is often used today to discredit the grievances of the Black Lives Matter movement, another professor says. Whenever an unarmed black or brown person is shot by police, some deflect the issue by saying, "Yes, but all lives matter."
No. 3: Those who choose chaos
There's a famous line from the classic film, "Casablanca." A police officer is closing down a casino, declaring, "I'm shocked -- shocked -- to find that gambling is going on in here!" -- all while pocketing his casino winnings as they're being handed to him on the sly.
That line could apply to Trump supporters who say they're frustrated by the President's statements on race since Charlottesville erupted.
How could you be shocked?
"This is who he is, this is what he does," says Anderson, the Emory University professor. "'Mexicans are rapists and criminals.' That's what he said in his first speech. Their complicity comes in the form of self-denial instead of owning it." For those who say they voted for Trump despite his intolerance, Anderson offers this analogy: Minister Louis Farrakhan.
Farrakhan is a leader in some parts of the black community because of his message of self-help and black empowerment. He reached peak popularity in the 1990s, but he also preached anti-Semitic, anti-white, anti-Catholic and anti-homosexual rhetoric. And the organization he leads, the Nation of Islam, has taught that white people are inherently evil.
No. 4: Those who look the other way
Ari Kohen knows something about the cost of hate. When he looked at images of neo-Nazis chanting "Jews will not replace us!" in Charlottesville, he thought of his grandfather, Zalman Kohen. He was living in rural Romania in 1944 when the Nazis rounded him up with the help of his neighbors and sent him to a death camp.
His grandfather survived, moved to the United States and lived until he was 90. But he never returned to Romania, says Kohen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
"He could never forgive his neighbors," he says. "These were people who, maybe they didn't love Jews, but these were people who lived next to each other. They knew his family and he knew their family. The idea that they could all stand by while life was completely and forever changed for large portions of their community -- he could never understand it."
Never underestimate the ability of ordinary people to look away.
Some do it with family members. Kohen says the hundreds of white racists who descended on Charlottesville must have family or friends who noticed their behavior beforehand. He suspects that some refused to confront them.
"There's this wink and nod, everyone knows that this person is going down a dangerous path and people passively go along with it," he says. "They don't want to rock the boat. This is family or a friend. It's hard to distance yourself from people you care about."
This passivity extends to how people react when their country's leaders become intolerant, others say. Once you see it coming, you have a duty to act, says Naison, the activist and Fordham professor.
"If you don't speak up when this sort of ideology is being promoted at the highest level, you end up being complicit in the actions taken by its more extreme adherents," Naison says. "Once the demons are unleashed, you've become a co-conspirator."
There's also evidence, though, that millions of ordinary Americans from all walks of life don't want that kind of America. Heather Heyer, the demonstrator who lost her life in Charlottesville, was a young white woman who marched in solidarity with black protesters. Millions of Americans have since taken to the streets or social media to stand against what happened there.
If you want to know why those white racists now feel so emboldened, it may help to look at all the ordinary people around you, your neighbors, your family members, your leaders. But first, start by looking at yourself.
For my "friends" who voted for Trump, if you are not loudly condemning his actions and refusing to look the other way, then you are complicit. You betrayed your LGBT friends when you voted for Trump and it will be your actions that determine whether or not you are a white supremacist by default.
Sunday, August 20, 2017
Trump’s Aides Tried to Conceal His Crazy, Racist Beliefs
Back during the 2016 presidential campaign, a number of clues pointing to Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer's racist beliefs came to light. One was a lawsuit Trump settled with the Department of Justice over discrimination against blacks in apartment facilities in Norfolk, Virginia. The, of course there was the arrest of Trump's father at a KKK rally in the 1920's, suggesting that racism is a family tradition. Last Tuesday, Trump put all of the venom he holds towards minorities on open display when he more or less supported the "fine people" with the KKK members and Neo-Nazi thugs in Charlottesville, which prompted The Economist to feature Trump on its cover using a Klan hood as a megaphone. All of this in turn raises the question of the morality of Trump's advisers who seemingly know his real animus towards blacks and other racial minorities. What kind of person works to support a malignant person like Trump? A piece New York Magazine ponders this question. Here are excerpts:
Donald Trump’s aides have been angry with him frequently — indeed, usually — since the beginning of his presidential campaign. But they have rarely registered their dismay as nakedly as they did Tuesday night, when he spontaneously altered a plan to deliver remarks on infrastructure without taking questions into a free-form defense of white supremacists. One official told NBC News that Trump had “gone rogue.” Mike Allen reports that chief economic adviser Gary Cohn is “between appalled and furious,” and that there is a danger one or more high-level officials could resign. Chief of Staff John Kelly’s disgust was registered on his face. . . . It is impossible to recall a presidential aide contemporaneously broadcasting his disgust with his own president.
But it is important to understand the precise nature of their distress. It is emphatically not because they are shocked to learn their boss is a racist, a fact that has been established through numerous episodes, such as Trump’s insistence a Mexican-American judge was inherently biased against him, his call for a Muslim immigration ban, his slander of Ghazala Khan, and so on. They are angry that Trump revealed beliefs they wish to keep hidden. “Members of the president’s staff, stunned and disheartened, said they never expected to hear such a voluble articulation of opinions that the president had long expressed in private,” reports the New York Times.
This raises the question once again of why they are working for Trump at all. A legitimate public rationale can be made for serving the administration in certain roles. The federal government plays a vital role in domestic and global security, Trump is a dangerous and erratic figure, and somebody needs to try to steer him away from decisions that would provoke unalterable tragedy. That justification covers serving Trump as a foreign-policy adviser, or as homeland security and disaster-response officials.
But what justification can the domestic and political advisers offer? Any benefit they can get by helping produce what they regard as better policies is surely offset by the cover they (and their policy successes, should they produce any) provide him.
Trump certainly has revived certain aspects of the political excitement of the 1930s: Nazi torchlight parades, presidential attacks on the media as enemies of the people, and street battles between armed extremist factions. He has not yet revived the infrastructure build-up that supplied a great deal of the Nazi party’s political capital. The apparent objective Trump’s domestic advisers hope to achieve is to create a political constituency for a president they consider racist, while concealing his racism as best as they can.
A West Wing official tells the Times that Trump has “expressed sympathy with nonviolent protesters who he said were defending their ‘heritage.’” (This is a rally that began with chants like “Jews will not replace us.”) Preventing Trump from doing something damaging is a legitimate and even noble calling. But that admirable motivation can easily mutate into rationalization. Are Trump aides really working to protect the country from him? Or are they working to keep the country from seeing his real nature?
Charlottesville and Trump Reshape Virginia Gubernatorial Race
Last week I wrote about Ed Gillespie's effort to hoodwink Virginia voters into believing that a vote for him would not be a vote for the Trump/Republican Party extremist, white supremacist agenda. The reality is that between the need to court Corey Stewart supporters (see below) and swear obedience to The Family Foundation, Gillespie's agenda if elected would be far different than what his plain vanilla, specifics free campaign effort offers.
In contrast, Ralph Northam who I have known for over 10 years is the real deal. When Northam says something, it is after thoughtful consideration and it is genuine rather than what seems expedient at the moment. The contrast between Northam and Gillespie could not be more stark. Gillespie is basically a would be slick used car salesman, while Northam is a thoughtful veteran and physician.
Thankfully, the horrors that unfolded in Charlottesville, Trump's embrace of white supremacists and the rantings of Corey Stewart - a Minnesota transplant running on a pro-Confederate, white supremacist platform who almost defeated Gillespie in the GOP gubernatorial primary and who says he will challenge Senator Tim Kaine - will continue to make life difficult for Gillespie. Moreover, as he continues to refuse to condemn Trump (who is VERY unpopular in Virginia's urban crescent), Gillespie unwittingly assists Democrat candidate Ralph Northam. A piece in the New York Times looks at the disingenuous balancing act that Gillespie is trying to maintain.
The bloody white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., has thrust race and history to the forefront of this year’s campaign for governor in Virginia, a tradition-bound state whose identity has always been rooted in a past that is as proud for some residents as it is painful for others.
The gubernatorial race in this swing state was already set to be the next big test of the nation’s politics, its results inevitably to be read as a harbinger for the 2018 midterm elections and President Trump’s fate. But the events last weekend in one of its historical centers — in the city that Thomas Jefferson called home and on the university campus that he designed and founded — ensure that the nation’s highest-profile campaign this fall will also be fought in part along the highly combustible lines of racial politics.
With Mr. Trump defending Confederate statues and his former top strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, openly inviting Democrats to continue focusing on the issue of removing monuments, the president will loom large over the commonwealth in November.
In the aftermath of last weekend’s violence, Lt. Gov. Ralph S. Northam, the Democratic nominee for governor, has firmed up his call to take down Confederate monuments in the state where much of the Civil War was fought and where so many Confederate leaders, now memorialized in marble, emerged. We have to be sensitive to all people’s feelings and represent all Virginians,” he said, criticizing his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, for not “denouncing the president” by name after Mr. Trump asserted that there were good people marching alongside Nazi sympathizers and Klansmen last weekend.
Yet Mr. Northam has little appetite to make Virginia’s counties and cities uproot their memorials to the Confederacy and says the decision should remain up to the localities.
Mr. Gillespie also believes local communities should make that decision. . . . . “Rather than glorifying their objects, the statues should be instructional,” Mr. Gillespie said in a lengthy written statement earlier in the week.
In an illustration of this state’s complicated politics, and the expectations of each party’s base, it is Mr. Northam, the descendant of slaveholders and a product of Virginia’s rural eastern shore, who is calling for the statues to come down, while Mr. Gillespie, a New Jersey native who moved to Northern Virginia after establishing a political career in Washington, is more closely aligned with the old guard.
Democrats, while encouraged about having a tool to mobilize black voters in an off-year election, are cognizant of national polling that shows opposition to removing Confederate monuments is bipartisan. They also fear that conservative whites may come out in higher numbers to register their opposition.
Yet many Republicans are equally wary about running a gubernatorial campaign with race as a centerpiece. Virginia is an increasingly progressive state, and in an election that is bound to become nationalized, evading Mr. Trump, a deeply unpopular figure in the most vote-rich regions here, would be all but impossible for Mr. Gillespie under those circumstances.
“It puts Ed in a tough spot,” said State Delegate David Albo, a veteran Republican legislator, alluding to the pressure Mr. Gillespie is under to distance himself from the president. Or as Representative A. Donald McEachin, Democrat of Virginia, put it: “We have the gift that keeps on giving in Donald Trump.
Compounding Mr. Gillespie’s challenge, Mr. Trump is not the only incendiary Republican looming over this campaign.
Corey Stewart, who in June narrowly lost the nomination for governor after making the statues a central part of his platform, has already started his 2018 bid for the seat held by Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat. Mr. Stewart, a Minnesotan by birth, is using that bullhorn to complain that Mr. Gillespie is being overly timid on the matter of Virginia’s Confederate history.
“He’s like some dainty old lady who doesn’t want to get her hands dirty,” said Mr. Stewart of his former rival, adding: “If he continues to try to stay above the monuments’ debate he will lose the election.”
The searing images of torches and mayhem on the University of Virginia’s iconic lawn and murder in the community that Mr. Jefferson made his home have left many in this state reeling, furious that a group of bigots from beyond the state’s borders have stained a place they revere.
Yet many African-Americans have long since grown tired of such prominent Confederate iconography as the horse-bound generals on pedestals who loom over Monument Avenue in Richmond, the state capital and former capital of the Confederacy.
Virginia effectively contains the political and social equivalent of Alabama and New Jersey within its borders, and its politics reflect this dichotomy. The affluent and educated urban crescent that stretches from the Washington suburbs down to Richmond and on to Virginia Beach votes differently from the poorer and more rural areas in much of the state’s south and west.
And this Balkanization increasingly shapes state politics as much as Virginia’s presidential preferences (it has supported the Democratic nominee in each of the last three elections). There are increasingly few Northern Virginia Republicans elected and rural Democrats such as Mr. Deeds, have become just as scarce.
Many in the political middle here fault Mr. Trump for effectively weaponizing the conversation.
“We need a rational debate, but I’m afraid the emotion of the moment after what Trump did just destroyed the opportunity for that discussion,” said Mr. Deeds, who did not criticize Mr. Northam but made clear he thinks localities should be free to decide the monument issue.
Yet much like the aftermath of the 2015 rampage by a white supremacist in a South Carolina black church, there is an impulse in Virginia to take a tangible step toward healing.
“This state is no longer a history lesson suspended in animation,” Mr. Sabato said. “This was a disaster for Virginia, and people want to put a period on it.”
Saturday, August 19, 2017
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