Stoking Anti-Refugee Fear One More Time

 Stoking Anti-Refugee Fear One More Time

I appreciate the poignancy of your editorial (11-01) on the recent violence this past week against the refugee supporting Jewish members of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.  In addition to this one could add the two African Americans killed at Kroger’s by a white gunman who just earlier tried to enter a predominantly black church in Jefferson Kentucky after pulling and banging on the door. These deadly acts also need to be considered in light of the approximately 13 pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats and other Trump critics, by an ardent Trump supporter. 

 While the president is not directly culpable for any of these events, it's a far from a coincidence that the perpetrators of these dastardly acts were aggrieved white males aiming their aggression against the unwanted other.  The president's demonizing anti-immigration rhetoric these past two weeks is utterly unhinged.  Whether designed or not, its cumulative impact stokes some of the worst bigotry that this nation is capable of producing.  The fact that the president continually refers to undocumented and refugee populations as bringing infestation into the country and demonizing the press as fake news and the enemy of the American people all too eerily echo the language of Hitler in the early 1930s, as well as that of Stalin.  The common denominator is the demagogic intent of rousing an unthinking, fear dominated population all-too-readily willing to be entertained by the continuous reality show that the president and his minions produce daily.  While it is dangerous to make too easy comparisons between European fascism and the right-wing nationalism of the Trump era, there are some unnerving parallels, particularly with the early Nazi period on the role of propaganda in the furthering of administrative goals.  Consider the following from Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf:

 The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.

 Or this:

         In the words of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister:

 

The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.

And 

It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.

 Any objective analysis of the propagandistic rhetoric the president draws on in his campaign messages or in his tweets give witness to such abuses of language, with the result that reality becomes obscured through a series of lies and half-truths that get drilled into the conscious and subconscious motives of the president’s most ardent supporters.  This messaging is re-enforced by the Fox News echo chamber.

 If such rhetoric were merely designed to entertain, Trump could be passed off for the ignorant racist buffoon he clearly is.  The fact that he holds the most powerful office in the world speaks to the imminent danger his presidency holds to the very heartbeat of the U.S. democratic and civic republican ethos that roots this country to its most cherished political values.  In the right- wing iconography stoked by this president, the image of the dangerous refugee and the lying press have replaced the undesirable Jew at the hallmark of the Nazi onslaught in demonizing the undesirable other.  While the targets are different, the intent, at least in rhetoric, is the same—the desire to remove the infestation from the body public to make America (Germany) great again.

 How the country will have voted on November 6th—in large part, in response to the Trump presidency—will be known by the time this letter is published.  Let us hope that the better angels of this nation's values prevail so that we can begin to craft a way to rectify this albatross called the Trump presidency.  This president, apparently incapable of shame or adhering to any reasonable set of values designed to promote the public good, is who he is.  There is no evidence to indicate that will change.   It is, therefore, up to the collective us to begin moving this poison from the body politic by democratic means only, which to ignore, will only further impair the republic.  Hopefully, that process will have begun on November 6 and will continue into 2020 and beyond.  If not, God help us all.

 2018

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