The Good Old Days

     The removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, provoked a rush upon that city of KKK, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and other racist men filled up to their eyeballs with angry cum.  They marched the night of August 11 and 12, after sunset Friday--the Sabbath--carrying tiki torches that looked ridiculous but also proved to be effective weapons used on counter-demonstrators.  Jews in the synagogue observing the Sabbath were made to feel the skin-crawling presentiment of Nazi persecution while the Charlottesville Police Department and Virginia National Guard did nothing to curb the excesses of hundreds of white men chanting anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans.  Their torchlit parade was right out of Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films of the 1930s.
     The following day, while police continued to do nothing, the Nazis and Klansmen battled with counter-protestors, the former armed in some cases with automatic rifles, also carrying shields and some dressed as cops in riot gear.  The kinds of kicks Brownshirts aimed at Jews in the 1930s were shot on video, shown on the news all weekend and all this week, accompanied by overwhelming condemnation in the mainstream press, although Fox News Channel's Jesse Watters (a Bill O'Reilly protege) pretended to be denser than he actually is when acting as if President Trump said everything he needed to say on August 12.
     To cap the event off, a neo-Nazi, twenty years old, drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring many and killing a thirty-two year old woman, Heather Heyer.  This ISIS-style method of mayhem didn't inspire Trump to condemn the obvious sources of the violence in Charlottesville.  That Saturday, he read a tepid statement condemning the violence that came "from many sides."  This implied equivocality between the Nazis/KKK and those on the other side, the anti-racist counter-protestors--those who suffered casualties.
     How can Trump do this?  That was the question uttered by many pundits and news anchors.  On Monday, August 14, Trump read another statement that condemned neo-Nazis, KKK, and white nationalists, as well as the violence committed in Charlottesville.  The next day, in Trump Tower, he descended from his penthouse to give a press conference on infrastructure rebuilding plans (one of his presidential campaign talking points).  Instead, he went on at length about Charlottesville, reversing what he had said on Monday, reverting to his initial Saturday statement about the violence coming "from many sides."
     It's obvious that he sees the violence and protests in Virginia on August 11 and 12 as something the far right nationalist/racist wing of his supporters needed to do.  Trump said of the Lee statue, "What's next?  Are they gonna pull down statues of Washington and Jefferson?"
     No, Trump; unlike Robert E. Lee, Washington and Jefferson weren't traitors against the United States of America.  General Lee fought to preserve the institution of slavery.  The states' rights issue of the American Civil War had to do with southern states retaining the right to maintain slavery.
     Trump, though no intellectual, manages to catch my attention whenever he attempts to speak about history or any other subject he knows nothing about.
     Two of his business councils (consisting of high-powered CEOs) have disbanded, revealing once again that Trump is a lousy businessman.  The mayor of Phoenix has expressed his disapproval that Trump will soon hold a rally in that city.  Statues have been vandalized, in Baltimore a few came down by order of the mayor.  It's not politically correct to honor the Confederate States of America at this time.
     The "Alt-Right," i.e., the neo-Nazis and KKK, as well as other white people who want their "country back," finds great encouragement from Trump's words during his "off the rails" (as CNN put it) press conference last Tuesday.  Trump has even been criticized by Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.  Throughout this past week, I have not heard even one mainstream news commentator or politician state the simple fact that Donald Trump is a racist.  In 1973 he ran into legal trouble when he refused to rent to Black tenants.  His racism goes back, publicly, that far.  It didn't just start in 1973.  He has in all likelihood been a racist most of his life.  Why would he, a racist, give the racists who raised chaos in Charlottesville a hard time?  At the ball, you dance with the one who brought you.
     Meanwhile, the same journalists going nuts over the Trump/Charlottesville story, ignore the daily slaughter of Afghan civilians by the United States military.  Trump, according to his tweet from about an hour ago, is in Camp David meeting with generals, talking about Afghanistan.  Rather than disengaging from that wretched country, Trump continues the horror, increases it further.  In Afghanistan is a "treasure trove" of rare earth metals.  The place is literally a gold mine, but the chaos and the ineptitude of the government there has prevented Afghans from developing that wealth.  The potential dollar value on all this is in the trillions of dollars.  Another nation with trillions' worth of undeveloped metal richness is North Korea.
     It's not a mystery.  The U.S. wants Afghanistan's and North Korea's mineral wealth, and Trump is a racist.  According to his first wife he's also a rapist and wife beater.  It tends to be the most low grade type of human being that gets into the political racket.  Once a person understands that, an illusion is necessarily dissipated.

                                                                               Vic Neptune