Trump Spews Racist Venom, Lays Groundwork for Ethnic Cleansing
January 1, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In late December, the New York Times reported that at a June meeting with members of his cabinet and staff, an enraged Donald Trump bellowed that the federal government hasn’t limited all immigration and carried out deportation of immigrants vigorously enough.
In the first months of Trump’s presidency, about 15,000 Haitians received visas to come to the U.S., in part because Haiti is still recovering from an earthquake and a subsequent cholera epidemic that devastated the country beginning in 2017. The Times reported that Trump sneered that these Haitian people “all have AIDS.” His slanderous, racist insults continued against the Nigerian people who had legally traveled to the U.S., often on family visas. He said they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa. He complained about the 2,500 people from Afghanistan, which he described as a “terrorist haven.”
Trump is full of shit. A few facts here. For centuries, the United States has inflicted enormous suffering and exploitation on the people of Haiti. (See the “American Crime” article, “The U.S. Invasion, Occupation and Domination of Haiti”.) After the devastating 2010 earthquake, a United Nations “peacekeeping” effort in which the U.S. played a key role brought the first cholera outbreak in its history to Haiti. About 10,000 people died, and 800,000 were sickened. The U.S. has ransacked Nigeria for its oil and left much of its once fertile delta an environmental deathscape of shriveled trees, oil spills and fires. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and has occupied parts of the country since. Over 100,000 Afghans have died in that war, and millions of people have been driven from their homes. And Trump has the fucking nerve to call Afghans “terrorists”!
After the Times story broke, Trump’s staff denied that he used the words “AIDS” or “huts.” But Trump himself has not denied it. And the Times has not retracted its original account, which was picked up by many newspapers and websites. Whether or not Trump said those exact words, there is no doubt that white supremacist, “America First” language is the language Trump speaks; there is no doubt that vicious, relentless assaults on immigrants, especially immigrants who are not white, or whose first language is not English, or who are Muslims, have been at the center of Trump’s program of “making America great.”
Trump’s racist rants are not simply the outbursts of a disturbed and hateful individual. They express an actual fascist program of “ethnic cleansing”: removing “undesirable,” mainly non-white, immigrants from this country in their hundreds of thousands and even millions, and preventing others from coming in. They energize the seething mob of racists that is his base, and help mobilize them to support government attacks on immigrants, and organize “unofficial” assaults and violence.
These attacks must be opposed by people of all nationalities, not just immigrants or the particular nationality affected by any particular attack. They must be defeated.
From the Call of Refuse Fascism: “Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors. All of this has already begun under the Trump Regime. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late. ”
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