Donald Trump: Fascist Trailblazer for Even More Massive U.S. Crimes
December 7, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Donald Trump claims that after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York he was watching as “thousands and thousands of people were cheering” as the World Trade Center buildings crumbled, “on the other side of New Jersey where you have large Arab populations" (such cheering never actually happened). Before the horrific mass murders in San Bernardino, Trump said, “You have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.”
In the past couple of weeks Trump—a leading candidate for one of the two main political parties in the U.S.—has intensified his hate-filled tirades based on lies and demagogic appeals to ignorance, fear, and “America First” jingoism.
Let's be clear: Trump's lies that Muslims danced with glee at the destruction of the World Trade Center are no different from the rumors that white racists spread in the Jim Crow South that a Black man had allegedly raped a white woman, or the lies that circulated like a virus in medieval Europe that Jews had killed a Christian child and used the blood to make matzoh. The aim, and almost always the result: a brutal mutilation and lynching of a Black man, or a pogrom (mass destruction and murder of an entire community) of Jewish people.
Crimes of that magnitude cannot be allowed to happen again.
The fact is, Muslims, and people from the Middle East and South Asia generally, have been targets of a mounting wave of violence and hatred since 2001. After 9/11, racists not only attacked Muslims, they attacked and even killed people who they thought were Muslims—like Sikh men from India who wear turbans. Earlier this year, there was the horrific, racist murder of three Muslim college students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—one of the victims told her father a few days earlier that the man who ended up killing her and two others “hates us for what we are and how we look.” The Council of American-Islamic Relations recently said that since the ISIS attacks in Paris in November, they have received more reports of acts of "Islamophobic discrimination, intimidation, threats, and violence targeting American Muslims" than they had in any period since September 2001.
Trump is promoting this kind of hate-filled paranoid atrocities—and coalescing a mob of racist Americans who go along with it, who clap and laugh when they learn of assaults on Muslims, who would do it themselves. He is doing this in service of a global capitalist-imperialist system of oppression and exploitation. The endless TV airtime and newspaper/website exposure Trump has had—and the sprint by many others among this system’s political leaders to match his anti-Muslim, anti-Arab venom—serve to legitimize and present as the “will of the people” a program of violent and even murderous xenophobia (irrational fear and hatred of “outsiders” and people from other countries).
Trump is pushing for more widespread and unquestioned powers of repression, surveillance, suspicion, spying and, yes, pogroms of horrible violence in this country. And he is paving the way for a program of intensified global slaughter on a scale beyond the million already murdered in the U.S.'s wars of empire since 2001. His acceptance as part of the “political landscape” by the powers-that-be are legitimizing this program. Whether this horrific program is carried out by him, or by Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, or any other representative of this system, it must be confronted and opposed by mass resistance.
Stop thinking like Americans and start thinking about humanity!
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