Thom Hartmann hosted a recent discussion on the Trump administration’s seeming ambition for “making America white again”. This dramatic normalization of white nationalism is in no way hyperbole. It is gross and mindless, and the people who deny its prevalence are disturbingly imbalanced. A key component to the white-washing of white nationalism is in the movement’s assertion that it is populist and alt-right, as though the far right of the political spectrum has not been intrinsically racist and xenophobic for the past 50 years. And by the definitions provided by Howard Zinn populism has always been the opposition to Capitalism, yet as this mindset of alt-right populism is surging across America and Europe as well, its proponents unironically hold dear the tenets of Capitalism in its most unbridled form.
As if Trump picking someone dedicated to privatizing public schools, where schools would spend more on marketing than on anything else, as the Secretary of Education was not conflicting enough, GOP lawmakers have introduced a bill to abolish the Department of Education altogether. Which should by all rights, if reason existed anywhere in America, amount to pure treason. These Capitalist politicians seek to guarantee a slave caste.
Knowledge is the ultimate power, even more than money. The establishment knows this, so does all that it can to stifle its development left and right. Trump’s pick for Attorney General being quoted as admitting he liked the KKK until he heard some of them smoked pot (though clearly not enough), and the fact that so many Trump supporters still trust his judgement calls, exemplifies how dramatically an uninformed populace can so easily be bent. Demonstrators marching in New Haven, Connecticut against the President’s xenophobic policies were met with such violence by their city cops and state police that even the police K9s sided with the protesters, with 3 different officers receiving minor injuries from the dogs.
People who refuse to acknowledge how Muslim flight bans and the proposed Mexican wall are deeply racist and xenophobic are all parts of the problem. Steve Bannon, the Karl Rove to Donald Trump’s George Bush, promoted these frames of thought ad nauseum in his years guiding the confederate Breitbart News, and having a seat in the White House is no reason to believe he has loosened his trigger finger. Contrary to claims that Bannon is not a bigot, he has in fact aligned himself openly with voices in the Roman Catholic church opposed to the more leftist messages pushed by Pope Francis, leftist messages which are devoutly populist.
How is this related?
I have written before about what exactly could make the Roman-Catholics feeling disconnected from their current pontiff happy. Opposition toward his views that sacrifices beyond merely paying paltry tithes are fundamental would appear to be the root of the division. Many Catholics, many Christians, do not appreciate having it spelled out that Capitalism has overtaken Judaeo-Christian theology. They need the immediate, modern comforts that competitive consumerism provides more than the promise of enlightenment or eternal peace. They are not the first to think this way, of course.
Nazi Germany as well tried to rationalize worldly pleasure with religious dogma, manufacturing a new brand, a new denomination of Christianity called Positive Christianity in the 1920s and 1930s. It was designed specifically to win favor with and influence over the multitudes of Christians in Europe. Evidently, at the time the Nazi brain-trust felt it was not able to challenge the power of the Vatican directly. So they played down the ideas of Christ as the son of god who reportedly died for the world’s sins, but played up Christ as a skilled leader who could unite peoples. Exchanging the physical for the metaphysical, with success and riches of the world valued over the rewards of the afterlife. The Catholics today who take offense with Francis have the same convictions, same desires, as the plot of the Nazis.
And thus Bannon, while duplicitously asserting he holds no racial or ethnic bias, aligns himself with people who play by the same rules as “real” Nazis, trusting that his party’s followers will be too uninformed to know better. Trump’s supporters have been bending over sideways (to the right) explaining away the influx of agendas and policy drenched in prejudice, and here Bannon made that much more difficult to take seriously. This is him admitting that while the labeling and packaging might be different, the content and ideology are absolutely cut from the same prayer cloth. Their type won’t even care about the suffering of the succotash.
But speaking of aligning with people who play by the same rules as Nazis, the Zionist government of Israel has officially banned all deliveries of anesthesia to hospitals in Gaza. A law cruelly passed to make suffer even more the people who are not even allowed to vote for the people making such laws in the first place. Unsurprisingly, Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. senate have united to pass a bill attacking Palestinian solidarity and boycotts of Israeli financial interests. Because Israel apparently has more of a right to withhold anesthesia from the families it bombs than Americans do in being bothered by the startling inhumanity.
Despite writing a book on the matter, purported lefty journalist Chris Hedges, who should know better considering the wealth of authors he has plagiarized, has made the erroneous claim that the mercenary group Blackwater is the militant wing of the alt-right. What Hedges is embarrassingly oblivious towards is the small fact that virtually every gun club and militia in the United States are conservative-voting Christians, so that he comes across as making the bold claim that a militant group has a militant wing. Some water might be wet.
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and brother of that previously-mentioned school-privatizing Secretary of the Department of Education, very recently spoke in favor of colonialist tactics employed by the British East India Company, apparently in favor of privatizing militarism in general. On a related note, television screenwriter Steven Knight has described the British East India Company as “the equivalent of the CIA, the NSA and the biggest, baddest multinational corporation on earth, all rolled into one self-righteous, religiously-motivated monolith.” At first glance this would appear to be precisely what Uncle Sam perpetually obsesses with reconstructing.
Militarization is wrong in general, but the militarization of domestic peacekeepers is a far graver malfeasance, especially as they are increasingly prone to abusing their authority anyway. Their numbers consist exclusively of sadists, misogynists, bigots, neo-Nazis, jocks, drunks and drug-pushing pill-heads; and the climate in America today affords them a carte blanche that encompasses even unprovoked murder with surprising regularity. Roughly half of all police officers are former military, and the only trade more prone to Domestic Violence than law enforcement are military. And most people who sign up for the military do so only because they cannot get hired on anywhere else, being naturally such cake-taking class acts.
I think it was documentarian Robbie Martin who recently, somewhere suggested that Trump will likely pass some hollow jobs legislation, such as a nationwide infrastructure program, so that Trump’s mouth-breather fans can still feel validated for their truly horrible decisions in life. I could see this happening, only it won’t involve infrastructure. I bet Trump nationalizes the many assorted militias to be paid brown-shirts. The militarization of police forces is bound to implode eventually, but perhaps this would present a way for concerned but heavily armed citizens, their being conservative-voting Christians purely incidental, to be deputized so they can feel like they are contributing. They would proudly protect their communities from terrorism through assisting law enforcement with harassing, beating, raping, robbing and murdering anti-establishment dissidents, immigrants and refugees, journalists, and anybody else who looks at their bruised egos funny.
Truth is powerful, and out-thinking this sort into whatever designated corner will enable your ideas to eat away at them no matter if they push the big red button or not. Some agencies are so frightened by ideas they cannot defeat that they resort to separating heads from their respective bodies, like trying to stop an already sent email from going through by shutting down their computer. Nobody gets out of this world alive anyway, but condemning a man to an unconquerable line of thought will terrorize him the rest of his days and nights. Unconquerable lines of thought like the truth of their own circumstances, that these people are racists. That they worship material wealth above and beyond the claims of their own theologies. That they are incapable of standing on their own merits, of accomplishing anything in this world without bringing everyone else down to their knees. That they are in fact the bad guys.
A rosy cross by any other name is still calling a spade a spade.