{"id":1417777,"date":"2023-12-29T06:56:30","date_gmt":"2023-12-29T06:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=309189"},"modified":"2023-12-29T06:56:30","modified_gmt":"2023-12-29T06:56:30","slug":"adolph-trump-and-genocide-joe-race-blood-vermin-and-weimar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/12\/29\/adolph-trump-and-genocide-joe-race-blood-vermin-and-weimar\/","title":{"rendered":"Adolph Trump and Genocide Joe: Race, Blood, Vermin, and Weimar"},"content":{"rendered":"
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CSPAN screengrab.<\/p><\/div>\n

Lefties still struggling even now with Trump\u2019s Fascism Denial Syndrome (TFDS) might want to look at the orange \u201cpopulist\u2019s\u201d recent statement on immigrants<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are poisoning the blood of our country. That\u2019s what they have done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they\u2019re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is straight up Hitlerian rhetoric, replete with eugenicist, Darwinian, white supremacist, and genocidal \u00a0suggestions that nonwhite people are despoiling the genetic stock of the white fatherland.<\/p>\n

Donald \u201cVermin<\/a>\u201d (see below) Trump has long been a fan of Adolph Hitler. He once kept\u00a0My New Order<\/em><\/a>, a volume Hitler speeches, by his bedside table. Ivana Trump, his first wife, saw him reading the book with great interest. During a trip to France in 2018, Donald \u201cRetribution<\/a>\u201d Trump told his chief of staff John F. Kelly that \u201cHitler did a lot of good things<\/a>.\u201d The former president \u00a0complained to Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, that US generals didn\u2019t treat him with the kind of obedience the Nazi Third Reich\u2019s military commanders showed to Hitler. \u201cWhy can\u2019t you be like the German generals in World War II?\u201d<\/a> he asked Kelly.<\/p>\n

Hitler\u2019s vile 1926 autobiography\u00a0Mein Kampf\u00a0<\/em>contained a chapter titled \u201cRace and People\u201d in which he wrote that \u201cAll the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.\u201d Hitler linked \u201cthe poison which has invaded the national body\u201d to an \u201cinflux of foreign blood\u201d that threatened the \u201cpurity\u201d of \u201cthe Aryan race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald \u201cTake Down the Metal Detectors\u201d Trump\u2019s reference to \u201cmental institutions\u201d ought to raise alarms.\u00a0 The Nazi Third Reich\u2019s first victims of genocidal extermination<\/a> included mentally handicapped people considered by Hitler and his party to be genetic poison and \u201cuseless eaters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Trump statement quoted above was\u00a0made two weeks ago in Durham New Hampshire<\/a>.\u00a0 It was not the first time that Herr Donald used the phrase \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country\u201d in relation to immigrants, millions of whom he plans to put in giant concentration camps when he gets back in the White House. He used those five words last October during an interview with the neofascist website \u201cThe National Pulse.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s new in Trump\u2019s latest \u201cpoisoning our blood\u201d comment is his explicit specification of the nonwhite origins of the immigrants he accuses of contaminating US-Amerikan body fluids and pedigree (South America, Africa, Asia being directly mentioned) and his disturbing reference to \u201cmental institutions.\u201d (It\u2019s true that Trump also said, \u201call over the world,\u201d but we know very well from his previous comments that he does not mean white Europe.\u00a0 Recall that in 2018 Trump referred to African nations, \u00a0Haiti, and El Salvador as \u201cshithole countries\u201d and asked why<\/a> the US couldn\u2019t get more immigrants from \u201cplaces,\u201d that is white nations, \u201clike Norway.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Trump these days is more than merely \u201cechoing\u201d Mein Kampf<\/em>; he\u2019s giving textbook expressions of Hitler\u2019s hateful volume. During a Veterans Day speech last November, Trump pledged <\/a>to \u201croot out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin <\/em>within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within,\u201d Trump said, channeling the virulent, paranoid, and palingenetic ultranationalist<\/a> \u201cstabbed in back\u201d language and spirit of Hitler.<\/p>\n

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat told the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> that \u201ccalling people \u2018vermin\u2019 was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not just any violence. As the psychologist Allan Kanner wrote two days ago here on CounterPunch<\/em><\/a>, \u201cIf Trump\u2019s opponents are vermin, why not exterminate them? Germans were capable of that behavior. Are Americans really that different<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung had a fasci[st]nating response to those who pointed out that Trump was sounding like Hitler with his shocking \u201cvermin\u201d statement. \u201cThose who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly\u2026suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and\u00a0their entire sad and miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House<\/em>,\u201d Cheung told\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the point at which a half-smart Trumpenlefty (there\u2019s a couple of those) might say \u201coh yeah? Well what about Genocide Joe Biden?\u00a0 He is actively backing actual full on racist genocide in Gaza.\u00a0 The US under Biden is funding, equipping, and protecting the racist, Ziofascist occupation and apartheid state of Israel as it conducts a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing that has so far killed more than 21,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.\u201d<\/p>\n

To which my response is the following: 100% correct. I hold no brief for Sleepwalker Joe. I don\u2019t need the lecture.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been denouncing the mass-murderous imperialism of the Democratic Party since I first became politically conscious, in the late 1970s. I\u2019ve been in the streets protesting what I call the US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza,<\/em> leading chants like the following: \u201cHey Israel, USA, how many kids did you kill today?\u201d<\/p>\n

The common Trumpenlefty charge that (in essence) one somehow embraces the capitalist-imperialist Dems because one has the elementary knowledge base and decency to describe the ever more openly Hitlerian Trump Republican Party as fascist is childish nonsense. It is a truly idiotic accusation to level at people who, like me, have long condemned the Democrats as a repellent capitalist-imperialist organization[1]<\/strong> and indeed as the bigger war criminal of the two reigning US-imperialist political parties.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say that my neighbor has two vicious and sociopathic dogs, both of which menace my neighborhood and both of which I have denounced.\u00a0 But then let\u2019s imagine that only one of these two dangerous canines has recently been infected by rabies. If I point out that one of the dogs is now rabid, does that mean I am somehow embracing the non-rabid dog? Of course it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

(Here I might add that it has been Trump Republicans and not Democrats who have been most eager to openly embrace the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gazans and who have done so in openly racist ways.\u00a0 The Democratic Party base is far less comfortable with Israel\u2019s horrific military actions than the Republican base.)<\/p>\n

To carry the absurdity of the \u201cTrumpenleft\u201d criticism further, let\u2019s imagine that I have consistently pointed out that the non-rabid dog has been a complicit enabler and conciliator of the rabies that has infected the other dog \u2013 and further that I have argued that the dominant social and political order that both of those dogs support is the generator or the rabies that now threatens life on our block. (That\u2019s pretty much my take on the Weimar Democratic Party and on the underlying system that both of the dominant US parties uphold.[1]<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

The end of the latest year under the rolling and accelerating apocalypse that is capitalism-imperialism is a good time to reflect on what we think we are doing with our lives that is better and more important than organizing to overthrow a system whose notion of a meaningful people’s choice is going as individuals into a voting booth once every four years for two minutes to make a mark next to the name of a Sick Imperialist Bastard like “Genocide Joe” Biden or next to the name of an Orange Fascist Maniac like Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump.<\/p>\n

Endnote<\/p>\n

+1. Please see my following books: Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9\/11<\/em> (Routledge, 2004); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History<\/em> (Rowman&Littlefield, 2007); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics<\/em> (Routledge, 2008); The Empire\u2019s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power<\/em> (Routledge, 2010); They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy<\/em> (Routledge, 2014); Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement<\/em> (CounterPunch Books, 2020); This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals and the Trumping of America<\/em> (Routledge, 2021).<\/p>\n

The post Adolph Trump and Genocide Joe: Race, Blood, Vermin, and Weimar<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lefties still struggling even now with Trump\u2019s Fascism Denial Syndrome (TFDS) might want to look at the orange \u201cpopulist\u2019s\u201d recent statement on immigrants: \u201cThey are poisoning the blood of our country. That\u2019s what they have done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Adolph Trump and Genocide Joe: Race, Blood, Vermin, and Weimar<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":272,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417777"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1417777"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1417778,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417777\/revisions\/1417778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1417777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1417777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1417777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}