Het is
het beest Trump nu geheel en al in de bolle kop geslagen, de hufter
durfde 13 maart jl. in een interview voor Breitbart te zeggen dat hij het leger, de politie en motorbendes aan zijn kant staan, maar dat ze gelukkig (nog) geen geweld plegen…..* (motorbendes: je weet, wel van die
gewelddadig misdadige ‘volwassen’ jongens met veel te grote brommers en oude
stinkauto’s) Met andere woorden: als Trump z’n zin niet krijg, of men probeert hem af te zetten, is dat nog lang
geen gelopen race, sterker nog die race zal niet eens van start
gaan……
In feite
dreigt Trump met een burgeroorlog mocht men hem proberen af te zetten, met de lullige toevoeging dat hij
aan de sterke kant zal staan met paramilitaire troepen om zijn
tegenstanders op te pakken, dan wel te vermoorden…..
Ben het
overigens niet eens met wat Sasha Abramsky, de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel, zegt over Putin: Rusland zit
toch echt nog voor het stadium van een totale dictatuur. Bovendien
hebben we aan Putin te danken dat het in Syrië niet volledig uit de
hand is gelopen, wat betreft de andere wereldmacht, of beter gezegd
terreurentiteit VS. Eén ding is zeker als Trump, of noem nog maar wat
VS presidenten, op de plek van Putin hadden gezeten met hun
administratie, waren we waarschijnlijk al in een wereldoorlog
verwikkeld geweest >> WOIII…..
Steve
King, een (fascistisch) ideologische partner van Trump en witte nationalistische
ploert, hield vorige maand zijn volgers een cartoon voor en gaf ze de
boodschap mee dat een burgeroorlog mogelijk is en dat dit een feest
zou zijn voor conservatieven wapenfanaten, ‘een feest’ om slappe
liberalen, ‘die niet weten welk toilet ze moeten gebruiken’, neer te
schieten…..
Zoals gezegd: Abramsky is de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel dat o.a. verscheen op Information Clearing House (ICH). Hij haalt het
verleden erbij, o.a. de SA van Hitler, paramilitairen die
tekeergingen tegen Joden, homo’s, of beter gezegd wat we
tegenwoordig Lgbt mensen noemen, maar ook tegen Roma, Sinti en linkse
tegenstanders…….
Het feit
dat Trump met paramilitaire acties dreigt is uiteraard te zot voor
woorden, hiervoor zou hij afgezet moeten worden, niet voor het
sprookje dat men Russiagate is gaan noemen, maar waarvoor niet één
nanometer bewijs is gevonden, zelfs niet na 2 jaar diepgravend
onderzoek…….. (nieuws van deze dag: aanklager Mueller adviseert de zaak verder te laten rusten, ofwel hij heeft nul komma nada bewijzen voor Russiagate gevonden!)
Beste
bezoeker, nog even dit: lullig misschien, maar wat mij betreft mag de
pleuris uitbreken in de VS en wel zo erg dat het leger uit andere
landen moet worden teruggetrokken, kan de wereld eindelijk een
ademhalen, zonder de hete ‘bloedige adem’ van de grootste terreurentiteit op
aarde in de nek te voelen…….
Het artikel verscheen op Information Clearing House (ICH) en werd eerder gepubliceerd op truthout (nam het artikel over van ICH, de foto komt van truth):
Trump
Threatens to Unleash Paramilitary Violence in the US
By
Sasha Abramsky
March
21, 2019 “Information
Clearing House” – This has been one of those whiplash
weeks where so many particularly monstrous words have emanated from
Donald Trump’s mouth and Twitter-fingers that it becomes almost
dizzying.
Where
to focus my outrage? Should I be most concerned about the fact that
the supposed “leader of the free world” stumbled through a series
of non-answers when asked about the growing threat of white
nationalism in the wake of the grotesque
massacre of
scores of Muslims in New Zealand? Or the fact that last weekend,
instead of tweeting sympathy to the victims of that massacre, Trump
chose instead to tweet out insults and lies about
a dead senator?
Or the fact that he threatened to
sic the Federal Communications Commission onto a comedy show he
didn’t like, while at the same time stepping
into the editorial fray to
urge Fox
News to
stand behind two particularly noxious commentators whom he does like?
All
these are bad, but none is as bloody awful as his musings
on unleashing paramilitary violence if
things go too wrong for him in the political arena. In his trademark
“I didn’t say it” way, Trump talked in a March
13 Breitbart interview
about how he had the
police, the military and the biker gangs in his corner —
and how wonderful it was that they weren’t violent … for now; the
clear nudge, nudge, wink, wink, subtext being that all he would have
to do is give a signal, and his armed proxies would go after his
enemies. A few days later, white nationalist Rep. Steve King, one of
Trump’s closest ideological soulmates on Capitol Hill, forwarded
to his followers a
cartoon about the possibility of a modern-day U.S. civil war, and how
gun-toting conservatives would have a field day shooting down
wishy-washy liberals who couldn’t even work out what public
bathrooms they wanted to use.
None
of this stuff is remotely funny, and it has no place in a functioning
democracy. Of course, many U.S. politicians in the past have called
out the hard-hat brigade when it suited them; segregationist Southern
governors during the civil rights struggle routinely stoked white mob
violence in an effort to block reforms. In 1968, Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley unleashed
the police against anti-war protesters with
the intent of busting open as many heads as possible. In the Tammany
Hall days, machine politicians weren’t averse to making unholy
alliances with street gangs. More recently, demagogues from Louisiana
politician Huey Long to Red Scare architect Joe McCarthy have
all-too-well understood the power of the crowd and the potency of the
threat of political violence in an already combustible situation.
But
for the most part, presidents have tended to stay away from such a
dark and dangerous path. They have done so not necessarily because of
moral scruples, but out of an awareness of the ferocious (and
ultimately uncontainable) forces that can be unleashed when a person
with the power and reach of the president of the United States
abandons all pretext of democratic governance; of respect for the
rule of law; and of an understanding that the game of politics has to
be bound by a set of rules or else it will degenerate into strong-man
rule, and, eventually, the unfathomable horror of civil conflict.
Trump
has, since he first announced his candidacy back in 2015, shown
little patience for the limits, the nuance and the necessity of
compromise that constitutional governance necessitates. He has, from
the get-go, shown himself temperamentally to be an autocrat, a man
with dictatorial ambitions who is far more comfortable in the
presence of rulers such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saudi
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro,
than democratic leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel or
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Over the last two years, the
Trump regime — and it is far
more a regime than an administration — has bent the GOP firmly to
his will on this.
Were
Trump’s outrageous comments about biker gangs and military
intervention in domestic politics just the random utterances of an
egocentric authoritarian, things would be grim enough. But over the
last two years, various GOP organizations around the country
have invited
white supremacist groups including
the Three
Percenters,
the Oath
Keepersand
the Proud
Boys to
either provide “security” at their rallies or to “spice up”
their events with speakers who advocate violence. All of these groups
are paramilitaries-in-the-making; all are — or at least were before
being brought into the mainstream by Trumpite Republicans — on the
far margins of the political process, their worldview more closely
aligned with fascist visions of society than with what passed as GOP
mainstream beliefs in the pre-Trump era.
Over
these last few years, the GOP has increasingly come to resemble a
political party whose raison
d’étre is
simply to nurture the cult of the personality around Trump rather
than to contribute anything genuinely resembling ideas into the
political discourse; a political party willing to embrace the most
violent and thuggish elements for partisan advantage. The scale of
this degeneration was on display last month, when Florida Rep. Matt
Gaetz publicly threatened congressional witness and former Trump
attorney Michael Cohen, and then blithely
claimed he
was just contributing to “the marketplace of ideas.”
Let’s
be real. Publicly blackmailing a witness is no more about “the
marketplace of ideas” than a mobster’s threat to make someone
“sleep with the fishes” if they cooperate with the police. Using
the presidential bully pulpit to goad an already angry and wrathful
“base” to consider violence against political opponents is,
again, no more simply part of the democratic rough and tumble, the
contest for hearts and minds, than would be the burning of a cross on
the lawn of a perceived enemy.
Unfortunately,
history is littered with examples of power-hungry rulers turning to
paramilitary violence when it was politically expedient. The
Sturmabteilung (SA) were the backbone of early Nazi power in Germany.
Their sadistic foot soldiers were unleashed against Jews, trade
unionists, communists, LGBTQ folks, independent journalists, artists,
academics and so on. In Latin America, paramilitaries were
instrumental in the dirty wars that decimated a generation of
progressives. Elsewhere, paramilitaries have been turned to in recent
times by leaders such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as
well as by genocidal leaders such as those in Rwanda and in the
Balkan states in the early 1990s.
In
his powerful essay, “In Defense of the Word,” written during a
decade when most of Latin America had fallen to dictators backed up
by paramilitary forces, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote
that the combination of authoritarian leaders and armed militias had
paved the way for “the development of methods of torture,
techniques for assassinating people and ideas, for the cultivation of
silence, the extension of impotence, and the sowing of fear.”
We
think we are different; we are, after all, Americans, and in the
U.S., we say to ourselves with a healthy dose of hubris, that we
don’t do things that way. But how different are we really? How thin
is our veneer? How vulnerable are we to the siren calls of political
violence issued from the biggest dais on Earth and amplified by the
instruments of social media?
Trump
and his acolytes are now truly playing with fire. The more Trump’s
legal woes mount up, the more he seems willing to embrace his
own Götterdämmerung vision,
a willingness to create maximum chaos simply to insulate himself from
justice.
In
an essay titled “Fascism in Latin America,” Galeano observed
that, “In the slaughterhouses of human flesh, the hangmen hummed
patriotic songs.” Trump, with his musings about the army, the
police, the biker gangs, his literal hugging of the flag at the
Conservative Political Action Conference, and his repeated conflation
of dissent with treason, is humming loud and clear these days.
Sasha
Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the
University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in The
Nation, The
Atlantic Monthly, New
York Magazine, The
Village Voice and Rolling
Stone.
Originally from England, he now lives in Sacramento, California, with
his wife, daughter and son. He has a masters degree from Columbia
University School of Journalism, and is currently a senior fellow at
the New York City-based Demos think tank.
This
article was originally published by “truthout”
–
==========================================
* Gezien het enorme en onevenredige geweld van de politie tegen gekleurde VS burgers en andere ambtenaren tegen vluchtelingen, is die uitspraak een gotspe!
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