My last article ended with the hope that Republican politicians would be moved toward impeachment by new evidence of Trump’s racism: alas, that is not how things are playing out: The attempt by a Texas Congressman to bring the question of impeachment to the floor following a vote to censure the President’s racist statements, failed miserably, and pundits still predict that he will be re-elected by his racist ‘base’. The left pleads with its voters to turn out in the 2020 election, without really refuting Trump’s accusation that if you’re Black — or even tan —you are not capable of loving this country and are probably a communist.
Instead of heeding the lessons of the Cuban revolution, rooted in the neglect of a mixed population by a ruling white elite, the US has allowed gangs to flourish under Central American governments similarly beholden to US corporations, motivating potential victims to seek asylum —and honest livelihoods —in the US. (Sometimes I wonder why no ‘barbudos’ have appeared in those little countries, but I guess different histories bring different outcomes.)
As things stand currently in the US, Trump’s base could play a bigger role in the 2020 election than money. At the first rally since attacking four recently elected progressive female representatives who call themselves ‘the squad’, his followers chanted ‘Send her back!’ targeting one member, Ilhan Omar, who was brought to the US from Somalia as a child. The chants echoed those of ‘Lock her Up’ against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, but instead of drilling down on Trump’s racism, the media breathlessly follows accusations of child sex trafficking against a multi-millionaire friend, the possibility of war against Iran getting relatively short shrift.
During the season when politics usually takes second place to the weather, a growing number of Americans are realizing that since the two-year long Civil War — the only one the country has experienced on its soil — Black Lives are still problematic. And now demographers estimate that thanks to Hispanic immigration, by 2024, America will no longer be a majority white country.
Desperate to maintain the Democrats’ commitment to centrism against the rising tide of progressives set off by Bernie Sanders in 2016 (the party successfully deprived him of the nomination!), Nancy Pelosi dismisses the four new non-white congress members as being ‘too far left’ to have a significant following, while Trump accuses them of communism.
When he claimed that those who love their country do not criticize it, MSNBC ran a clip of America’s most famous journalist, Edward R Murrow, stating at the height of the McCarthy era in 1954 that dissent was not dishonorable. (And what to say about Trump’s own call to ‘Make American Great Again’, which implies criticism of its present state? A popular German magazine, Das Bild put Trump on its cover draped in an American flag, next to the title of the memoir the young Hitler wrote while in prison, titled ‘Mein Kampf’: my struggle?) Never mentioned is the inescapable fact that ‘Make America Great Again’ implies criticism of the US in its current state, presumably because that would legitimize a socialist agenda, while the media must continually prove its bona fides by claiming that socialism is about ‘government control of citizens.’
Last year’s white supremacist march in Charlottesville (after which Trump claimed there were ‘good people on both sides’) was accompanied by the chant “Jews Will not Replace US”, however since then Trump has found it expedient, given Israel’s military weight in a Middle East awash with oil, to anoint it as a standard-bearer of white supremacy. He accuses Ilhan Omar of being anti-American for criticizing the United States, and anti-Semitic for supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel. This is bound to tilt the American Jewish community, whose progressivism stops at the Israeli-Gaza border, against the squad.
Although America’s porous southern border has been targeted by Trump since his first campaign, the average American never dreamed that he would go beyond President Obama’s policy of holding asylum-seeking mothers with their children while their claims were being evaluated. Admitting that the purpose is to discourage asylum seekers, Trump separates them, holding them in inhumane conditions that make even die-hard Trumps feel a bit guilty.
His white supremacist backers had good reason to pick him as their candidate: already in the early seventies, the real estate company he ran with his father was condemned by the Department of Justice for employing all sorts of subterfuges to avoid renting to black people. Currently, assertions among the chattering classes that the president is a racist are challenged by the young, Stephen Miller, who speaks in sharp-tongued sub-clauses and could well have been put in the White House by Trump’s those backers to keep him on message.
There is no room in this media picture for the fact that Vladimir Putin deals on a higher level with the fact that Caucasians only account for 16% of the world population. Reports that he opposes Europe’s policy of trying to assimilate refugees of color, (known as multiculturalism) leading him to back the new nationalists, are not linked to his conviction that diverse populations should remain amongst themselves. Most importantly, they are not linked to the fact that he has built strong relationships with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa (the original BRICS, soon to be joined by Muslim Turkey), in order to ultimately replace American hegemony by a multi-polar world.
Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones.
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