The reblog A Progressive Call to Arms caused several very different reactions. Pity some people did not want to react straight on the article and choose other, non public, ways.
History of Marxism timeline (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We very much appreciated the reaction of “camden41” a retired public school administrator and retired history professor, who took the time to spend a whole article on the writing and an extra one on our reaction. Though perhaps the impression may be given by that author that we do not know our history or do not want to see the “crux of the matter” or to belief Hitler “considered Marxists, Communists and Jews to be traitors.” We are aware of that fact, but that is just what makes us so weary about the president elect. In what way does he want to look at Marxists, Leninist, Communists, Jews, Muslims, refugees, Mexicans, homo’s, transgender and other people?
We also are aware of specific groups who would love abolishing the ever-enlarging systems of hierarchy, control, and environmental destruction necessary to sustain the growth of capital.
We also saw how certain people in the past made use of blackening others to get their goal coming into power. We also are aware that in the past many made use of the chaos and fear to bring others in discredit and to get people on their hand, promising that everything would change by them in power. And once in power they made sure that they could have the highest power for some time, getting rid of those who were standing in their way.
Should we not know when precious experiences in a person his life can make a very dangerous person of him or her, make sure that we look at the previous history of a person and come to look at him or her seriously, not making a joke of him or of his remarks. And Trump made remarks which should make us to think about it.
Should we not be aware where hate can come into existence and how it can grow fast like a virus? Should we not have our eyes opened seeing that people do want to shut out others and that marginalisation has become a favoured thing? Should we not be aware that some might think that marginalisation may be a strategy of protection, so that defence and obstruction cannot wait for the inauguration of an autocrat? Should we do not know what a certain person his sanctuary cities may be and how others may react on it?
Should we also not wonder how long people are going to take it that there may be political domination over them, having the capitalists squeezing workers’ pay packets, keeping individual wages for all blue-workers pretty much flat since a long time, having only a raise for higher level salaries?
These capitalists and their apologists hid the double squeeze behind their effective rhetorical use of issues such as civil rights and affirmative action to invoke in the late 1960s and after the “wages of whiteness”–which any attentive person should have figured wouldn’t pay any better than they did at the close of Reconstruction a hundred years earlier. {W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1992); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1991). }
Should we not worry when the president elect, though he might show to be calmed down, still continues in his line of thinking when he announced that Bannon, the controversial executive chairman of Breitbart News, would be his chief strategist, though he denied holding “ethno-nationalist” views?
Does oppression in all of its forms: microaggressions, street harassment, slut shaming, resource hoarding, not feels like hate? And is it not easy to generalise and should politicians not warn people to generalise, instead of generalising themselves?
Conflating oppression and hate is fraught with many more problems than such a seemingly small semantic shift would suggest, and if we are to effectively combat domination it’s imperative that we learn to avoid discussing oppression in terms of hate. {Why We Must Stop Speaking of Oppression as “Hate”}
When looking at our society we should not close our eyes for certain situations. There may be many Christadelphians who think we should not be active in politics, but they forget that does not mean we should close our eyes for what happens in the world or should not comment on it.
Even when we give our opinion we do want to have our readers to make up their mind for themselves and want them to give the opportunity to hear different opinions. Only by being open to other opinions people can come to a better insight and also can come to understand why and how others think differently. That way also people can come to see who can be going on dangerous paths of thinking and as such even can become a danger for the society. Only by exposing such ways of thinking the society can be protected.
It is not by closing our eyes for the things we do not want to hear nor see, that they will not exist. That is what our and our parents generation have clearly felt in the previous century. What happened in the Third Reich could only come so far because so many people did not want to know and did not want to see, because most often they were too much concerned about their own ego and their own well-being.
Today we should learn form the lessons of the past and should be weary of what is possible to come.
In the United States of America during this past year, anti-Semitic imagery proliferated on social media, Jewish journalists were targeted and longstanding anti-Jewish conspiracy theories got a fresh airing. Much of the bias originated with the alt-right, or alternative right, a loose group espousing a provocative and reactionary strain of conservatism. It’s often associated with far right efforts to preserve “white identity,” oppose multiculturalism and defend “Western values.”
There are too many Americans who close their eyes for the reports of anti-Semitic vandalism and other attacks which have risen. As the presidential race intensified, Jews started seeing their names bracketed with a series of parentheses in harassing tweets, signalling that the person had been identified as a Jew. The image became known as the Jewish cowbell and its source was traced to neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
During his run for president, Mr. Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to curb terrorism, claimed Mexican “rapists” were pouring into the country, making that Mexican immigrants also were looked at as perverts and criminals. For the African Americans Trump expressed he has no good eye for those who have “no education” and are “monkeys”. After Donald Trump won the presidential election, handouts where presented in many colleges with texts like “He’s much more likely to abuse you” and “Your kids probably won’t be smart.” Several universities made it clear that those flyer’s hateful propaganda and did not belong at a university.
At several places speeches where given against the Muslims.
LeftOfCenter writes
One of the techniques favored by Right-wingers like Kobach are to demonize strongholds of the Democratic Party. They call these big metropolitan areas, a.k.a. America’s biggest cities, Sanctuary Cities, which is code for ethnically diverse areas that want to relieve tensions between its residents, documented and undocumented. They have vowed to only enforce local laws and won’t do the bidding of Federal immigration agents. Kobach wants to change all that and we know he will do everything he can, likely with the help of the other Kansas notorious K word, the Kochs. So many K’s…KKKoincidence? {Kris Kobach Rumored To Be Attorney General Pick, Would Oversee Deportation Policy}
On television we in Europe could see Americans bringing the fascist greeting, holding out their arms in a Nazi salute, shouting, “Heil the people! Heil victory.”
We also could see several letters mosques had received. In those hate letters the Muslims are called “Children of Satan” and “vile and filthy”.
Clearly the writers of those letters do not know much about Islam and Who they worship, because they wrote
“You are evil. You worship the devil. But, your day of reckoning has arrived.”
It also called on Muslims to
“pack your bags and get out”.
Authorities were first alerted by the San Jose mosque, which received the letter on Thursday November 24. The other letters were received by the Long Beach and Pomona mosques a few days later and in the latter weeks of November other mosques all over the country were targetted.
Law enforcement agencies across the US have reported 257 anti-Muslim incidents last year, which represents a nearly 67% increase from 2014. The CAIR has said that more than 100 such incidents have taken place since Trump won the country’s presidential elections, Reuters reported. Trump, who campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform, had also pledged to ban the entry of all Muslims into the country for an unspecified period of time if he were voted into power.{Trump will do to Muslims what ‘Hitler did to the Jews’, letters to California mosques say}
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR-LA’s executive director Hussam Ayloush said the “irresponsible, hateful rhetoric” of the Trump campaign has fueled
“a level of vulgarity, vile hatred and anger among many self-proclaimed Trump supporters.”
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- A Progressive Anti-Trump View Point With My Rebuttal
- To SteppingToes, Read History More
- A Time for Treason
- Waking Up in Trump’s America, Part 1
- Why We Must Stop Speaking of Oppression as “Hate”
- U.S. Jews grapple with eruption of anti-Semitism in election year
- Racist Flyers on ‘Why White Women Shouldn’t Date Black Men’ Found at Texas University
- Kris Kobach Rumored To Be Attorney General Pick, Would Oversee Deportation Policy
- Holocaust Museum ‘Deeply Alarmed’ by Nazi Rhetoric at White Nationalist Conference
- Trump will do to Muslims what ‘Hitler did to the Jews’, letters to California mosques say
- Donald Trump Courts Fury by Bringing Stephen Bannon to the White House
- Many Jewish Groups Are Staying Quiet on Stephen Bannon
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Preceding articles
Added commentary to the posting A Progressive Call to Arms
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Additional reading
- The twist of politics and expression
- Migrants to the West #1
- Migrants to the West #2
- Migrants to the West #7 Religions
- Democratic downfall
- Classes of people and Cronyism
- Capitalism
- Capitalism and Inequality
- Capitalism downfall
- Collision course of socialist and capitalist worlds
- Blow to legitimacy of the capitalist system
- Increasing wealth gap of immense proportions in the Capitalist World
- Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #12 Conclusion
- The killing of capitalism
- Intellectual servility a curse of mankind
- What comes after neoliberalism?
- Misleading world, stress, technique, superficiality, past, future and positivism
- Still Hope though Power generating long train of abuses
- The Scensual World – Mission & Vision
- Are Christianity and Capitalism Compatible?
- The Truth About the Illuminati: Escaping Slavery
- Time to consider how to care for our common home
- Do we have to be an anarchist to react
- Right to be in the surroundings
- Capitalism and economic policy and Christian survey
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Further reading
- Whatever Happened To The Human Race?
- “Please show us that you see us. Please do all you can to stop this.”
- Mapping Trump’s Coming War on Immigrant Sanctuary Cities
- This is not a guide: Is the Alt-Right white supremacist?
- Bernie Sanders: Carrier Took Trump ‘Hostage and Won’
- A Call to Action: Women, We Need You
- Tribes Redux
- In Wake of Electoral Disaster, Democrats Announce Plans to Stick With Status Quo
- Why Donald Trump may not be able to close sanctuary cities
- Wanted: Presidential ‘Leadership’ In North Dakota (#NODAPL)
- Learning Diversity from the U.S. Government
- The Triumph of Diversity
- The Trump Pinata Preserving the False Obama Messiah
- Donald Trump racist? Quit it! He’s not the problem
- Majority of fatal attacks on U.S. soil carried out by white supremacists, not terrorists
- AP Rules on Writing About the ‘alt-right’
- Richard Spencer Says America Was ‘Designed’ for White People, Shouts ‘Hail Trump!’
- Jesus’ Great Commission to Our Islamic Siblings
- Avenues of Sameness
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Related articles
Stepping Toes 