Monday, February 27, 2017

The Warm Up Act



Donald Trump's deportation squads portend a dark future. Chris Hedges writes:

The warmup act for a full-blown American fascism and orchestrated race war is taking place in immigrant and marginal communities across the United States: Racial profiling. Random police stops. Raids at homes and businesses. People of color pulled from vehicles at checkpoints. Seizures of individuals with no criminal records or who never committed a serious crime. Imprisonment without trial. Expedited deportation hearings and removal proceedings that violate human rights. The arrest of a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Daniel Ramirez Medina, 23, who along with the program’s other 750,000 successful applicants had revealed all personal history to the government in applying for DACA status. Parents separated, perhaps forever, from their children. The hunted going underground. The end of the rule of law. The abandonment of the common good. The obliteration of a social state in which institutions and assistance programs—from public education to Social Security and welfare—make justice, equality and dignity possible.

There are historical precedents:

The Trump orders are written not to make America great again but to make America white. They are an updated version of the Nazis’ Nuremberg race laws, the Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Naturalization Act of 1870. They are intended to institutionalize an overt racial hierarchy in the United States, one already advanced by the miniature police states in which marginal communities of color find themselves.

It's all part of a "revolution" which Steve Bannon previewed at last week's CPAC conference. Bannon is quite a piece of work:

In a 2014 speech, Bannon said, “I believe we’ve come partly off-track in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union and we’re starting now in the 21st century, which I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism.” (He delivered the talk via Skype to a group of other right-wing Catholics gathered in the Vatican. For a transcript posted by BuzzFeed, click here.)

“There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global,” Bannon said. “It’s going global in scale, and today’s technology, today’s media, today’s access to weapons of mass destruction, it’s going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.”

Bannon's chief responsibility  appears to be filling Trump's empty head with ideas. But they're not new ideas. They're very old and -- Bannon obviously knows the meaning of the word -- they're very vicious.

And this is only the warm up act. Wait 'til we get to Act III.

Image: Rock Springs Church

6 comments:

Lorne said...

The world has to take notice and stand up, Owen, before it is too late. This is not a problem limited to the U.S. So far, American resistance seems to be growing, but I believe we all have a role to play.

Owen Gray said...

We certainly do, Lorne. After all, some of Trump's victims are heading our way. And, in our community, we are taking in more Syrian refugees.

The Mound of Sound said...


The seeds of chaos are sprouting and there are no guarantees that our political servants will weed the garden in time, perhaps not at all. Think back nearly 20-years when we were gripped in terror of Y2K. Who back then could have imagined any of this today? You would have earned nothing but derision for even suggesting something of the sort and yet here we are.

Owen Gray said...

I'm beginning to think that insanity is a virus, Mound -- like the flu.

Tal Hartsfeld said...

What I don't get:
What does immigration have to do with race anyway?

Isn't immigration about someone from one country decidedly attempting to change their citizenship to that of another country?

And, if someone is in a country illegally couldn't they be of any ancestry and of any race?

Isn't the issue more one of legality and of following the protocols of the written decrees of whatever country said individual is trying to take up a new residence in?

Owen Gray said...

All immigrants are perceived as "other," Tal. That's the problem. And it shouldn't be.