Let those who cast their ballot for Donald Trump, call him President.
My People are Working Class People. We relate to those People whom
Donald Trump calls, "Animals".
Dehumanizing those People with whom we disagree, is the first step
toward calling for their elimination. The use of "put downs" by
bullys is common throughout history. Even recent history. Europeans
fled to these shores and called the People living here, Red Devils,
Savages, and Half Breeds, among other names. We brought Africans to
our shores as Slaves, calling them Niggers, Coons, Jungle Bunnies,
Jiggaboos, and many other cruel names. No accident here. It is done
deliberately to put People in a lower status so we can brutalize them.
If Donald Trump continues such Bully Behavior, we need to run him out
of the White House on a rail, tarred and feathered. And we need to
assure Mike Pence that he will receive the same treatment if he
carries forth such mean behavior.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/18/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When Trump Calls Latinos "Animals," Should We Hear Echoes of the SS's
Undermen?
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
17 May 18
In the beginning of the internet back in the late 1980s and early 1990s
when
you for the first time had large and contentious discussions online at
bulletin boards like Usenet, attorney Mike Godwin noticed that the longer a
discussion went on, the more likely it was that someone would make a Hitler
comparison. Some internet aficionados even declared a thread over when
someone evoked the National Socialists of the 1930s. The implication was
that such a comparison was always hyperbolic.
The problem with Godwin's law is that it emerged at a time when we did not
expect to have a Neonazi president. Not being able to point to the real
similarities of Trump's White Nationalist discourse with Nazi premises
about
racial hierarchies would actually be dangerous at this point. And we have
seen Mr. Trump defend self-avowed Neonazis and Klansmen at Charlottesville.
It is not an optical illusion.
So yesterday Trump again called some undocumented migrants into the US
"animals." Calling people animals has been a parlor sport with Mr. Trump,
and he has often gotten things wrong, as when he used his wealth to
persecute the falsely accused Central Park 5.
Calling people "animals" is not just the use of an ugly epithet. It is not
merely impolite.
It is a call to mistreat the class of people so designated, to fear them
and
blame them and ultimately to seek to wipe them out.
"Animal" functions similarly in this regard to the Nazi technical term
"Untermensch" or underman, subhuman.
Richard A Etlin in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich
translates
passages from the infamous SS pamphlet of 1941, entitled Der Untermensch:
"It is a frightening creature, a mere shadow of a man, with humanoid racial
features, yet spiritually and psychologically more base than any animal.
Within this being rages a vile chaos of wild, uncontrolled passions, a
nameless desire for destruction, the most primitive desires, and naked
vulgarity."
The pamphlet goes on to be more specific about the identity of this
horrible
category of apparent human beings, who are actually animals or worse. It
specifies eastern Slavs (Russians and Poles) and Jews, among others. Not
even some members of those groups, but all of them. The pamphlet functioned
as a call for and a justification for the genocide against the Jews,
Gypsies, gays and other groups as well as the slaughter of Russian boys at
the eastern Front.
That is, denigrating people as less than human is a step toward permitting
their elimination.
Trump apologists would say that he is only calling gangbangers "animals,"
not all Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. But anyone who actually has listened
to him talk about those groups knows that he tars them all with the brush
of
gang violence. It is worth underlining that the vast majority of immigrants
are law-abiding, since they fear that tangling with law enforcement could
get them deported.
There are some 55 million Hispanic people in the US. Less than one percent
of them are gang members. Of the some 16,000 murders a year, only small
percentage appear to be tied to gangs. Of the total, typically nearly a
quarter are cases of close family members killing one another. Over half
of
women victims of homicide in the US are killed by an intimate, i.e.
boyfriend, spouse or former such. In general, most murder victims are
killed
by someone they know, not by a stranger from among the Undermen or
"animals." Only about 12% of victims are killed by a complete stranger.
The
best predictor for perpetration of violent crime is not ethnicity but
poverty. Nor should we give up on rehabilitating people who commit crimes,
even violent crimes. They are human beings, not animals.
Although Trump's initial move in eliminating those he sees as Undermen is
to
make sure they are deported if their papers are not in order, we have
already seen at Charlottesville that he condones white nationalist violence
against anyone who disagrees with him. He could be pulling our society into
more and more frequent racial confrontations. Minorities who fight back
will
be labeled terrorists by the president of the United States. That this
polarization Trump is trying to provoke could ratchet up into anti-Latino
pogroms cannot be ruled out.
It is unfortunately worth pointing out that although the Jews were on the
receiving end of discourse about dangerous subhumans in the Germany of the
1940s, today in Israel it is all to common to hear politicians refer to
Palestinians as "animals." That discourse is how you get rules of
engagement
where it is all right to shoot down unarmed, peaceful protesters in Gaza.
There are no Undermen. All human beings have the same rights.
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