It actually takes your breath away—this noxious proclamation by Donald Trump, a front-running candidate for the Republican presidential nomination: he’s glibly committed to creating a “deportation force” that will systemically expel some eleven million alleged illegal immigrants from the United States. In the tone of a kind of brown-shirted television host, he also breezily reports that “we will build a wall, a very high wall” between this country and Mexico. The entire horrifying process, he adds, will transpire in “a humane way.
As a Jew and a student of the civil rights movement, I find it impossible not to fall into some depressing and revealing numerical allegories: in 1933, there were eleven million Jews living in Europe. Adolf Hitler brutally ascended to power in Germany and began openly bellowing about deporting the Jews. This satanic notion quickly disintegrated into “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question” with the advent of the Second World War. By 1943, there were only five million Jews left alive on the continent.
Altogether, 60 million people died during World War II—the majority of them civilians, unwanted, in somebody’s way, degraded by deportation and racial frenzy. At this very moment, there are approximately 60 million refugees wandering on this planet, across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The only thing Donald Trump is espousing is the same viral hatred and genocide that has plagued this world for the last eighty years and that he doesn’t recognize, in his puffy self-absorption, is the reason we are in a state of unyielding terror and conflagration.
There is something evil about this man, Donald Trump.
The blood was about to stain the floor of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopalian Church this past June when Donald Trump incorporated the same contemptible, racialist madness into his opening statements as a candidate for president. In a self-indulgent mixture of narcissism and xenophobia—a kind of bombastic hate crime—Trump blared:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” [Washington Post, June 17, 2015]
“They’re bringing crime?” They’re rapists?” “They?”
What is the difference between such a poisonous indoctrination and any nighttime, cornfield, cross-burning preachment of a regional Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan? Make a distinction between this 21st century verbal barbarism and anything spoken and published by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda for the entire duration of the Third Reich.
The Jews were also rapists, criminals, social deviants, and, oh yes—here and there was “a good Jew.”
Well, there is no Klan anymore, some tell me, and Trump is just a pretentious, rich idiot. Just log on to the Internet and study the web site of what is now politely called “The Knights Party.” Not much to be found here that differs from anything clearly implied in Trump’s scandalously horrendous, fascist-soaked slurring of an entire, historic culture, nationality, and people into the most egregious stereotype ever conceived by the white man.
The current site of the KKK declares, in a précis of Trump’s unforgivable screed, that it is “Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America!”
Donald Trump seems like nothing but a Nazi in a suit. And until the Republican Party that incubated him has the courage and integrity to cancel his political credentials, every member of the “Grand Old Party” is just a hooded accomplice in this national rally of contempt that has nothing to do with America.
This article is from Ben Kamin’s website Spirit Behind the News
Photo: Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons