[Peace] Fwd: Trump(ets) of Doom: On Bringing der Fuehrer Back Home

[Karen Aram]

No mention of our expanded wars under Obama, but the point has been made. It’s also amusing:



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Trump(ets) of Doom: On Bringing der Fuehrer Back Home<https://mjw51.wordpress.com/2017/05/15/trumpets-of-doom-on-bringing-der-fuehrer-back-home/>
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As a 60s teen who read Camus and Sartre and fancied himself an existentialist, I used to think that all serious moral-ethical-political challenges were in the past and all we could do now was ask ourselves what we would have done had we been German in the 30s or whether we would have gone to fight like Orwell in the Spanish Civil War.

Somehow growing long hair, dropping acid and protesting the Vietnam war, or getting kicked out of high-school for refusing to stand for the Lord's Prayer (among other things), just didn't quite reach the level of the political and ethical challenges to personal integrity that confronted so many in the 30s.

It never occurred to me then that hindsight (especially the hindsight embodied in a historical tendency to valorize "the left" in the literary world that I entered almost every time I opened a book) might have been creating a clarity that people alive at the time could not possibly have experienced in reaching for a decision about which road to take.

I realize now that part of the reason nothing in my then-contemporary environment seemed to require the level of moral-political commitment that had characterized the left in the 30s was due to the elevation of fascism, especially in its Nazi variety, to the heights of metaphysical evil. I mean, LBJ was bad, but he wasn't Hitler, right?

Ultimately the Vietnam war killed around 3 million SE Asians and devastated 3 countries. The United States used chemical weapons, anti-personnel bombs and massive non-stop terror bombing as well as torture and assassination in a pointless and ultimately fruitless display of callous disregard for international law and human life.

But within a few years, American politicians, American media and Americans in all walks of life were wallowing in self-pity over the Vietnam Syndrome and the high cost of gasoline. Oh, and the 58 thousand American soldiers who died so that 3 million SE Asians--men, women and children-- would never again threaten American freedoms.

By the end of that episode of mass murder in the service of democracy, a majority of Americans had come around to the view that the war was a bad thing. The mind boggled. The combination of Richard Nixon and the Kent State shootings had somehow trumped the mindless slaughter and finally motivated Americans to oppose the war.

In recent years, various Arab dictators have been promoted to "Hitler-status" as the American public is primed for yet another war on yet another poor country filled with yet more non-white people whose children will die in massive numbers so that freedom and democracy can replace the Hitler du jour who oppresses them.

While domestic politics in the United States often revolves around what looks like nothing more or less than a game of "victim-victim, who is the victim?", foreign policy often revolves around the question of "who is the Hitler that the American war machine needs to take out next?" This is known as liberal interventionism. So it's liberal.

Putting aside the utility of maintaining a pervasive awareness of a "Hitler-Nazi = Ultimate Evil" equation for the apartheid and genocidal state of Israel, it is even more obvious that by never quite reaching the levels of iniquity of Nazi Germany,  Americans can usually obscure their own marked tendency to mass slaughter from themselves.

The Vietnam War in popular memory was not so much an American travesty as it was a Nixon crime. Gulf War II was not an American crime against humanity so much as it was a Bush crime, a Rumsfeld crime, a Cheney and a neocon crime. It is never about America and Americans and their constant rush to support American wars.

But along comes Trump, a genuinely ugly and vulgar man from the get-go. Suddenly Americans are able to envision a homegrown Hitler and an American Fascism sprouting all around them like unwelcome weeds on the otherwise pristine suburban lawn surrounded by the white picket fence of American feigned innocence.

The man isn't in office for a month and "Antifa" are out in skinny jeans and hoodies bashing fashis and setting off fireworks in order to keep media darlings like Ann Coulter from speaking at universities. A "Resistance" springs up, and immediately all kinds of folks who'd gladly bomb the shit out of brown folks are "anti-fascist".

It's almost as if history began, yet again, on the day Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. And what distinguishes Trump and "the Trump era" and "Trumpism" from all the other American administrations that have deliberately and consciously slaughtered millions of non-white poor people?

Racism apparently.

Who knew?





mjw51<https://mjw51.wordpress.com/author/mjw51/> | May 15, 2017 at 2:43 pm | Categories: Uncategorized<https://mjw51.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/> | URL: http://wp.me/pKmIb-Js

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