Do Not Let the Fascist Trump/Pence Regime Take Away our Freedom, Our Rights, Our Diversity, Our culture, the Environment and Humanity Itself!
Fidel Fajardo-Acosta Professor of English, Creighton University (Professor Fajardo is one of the 195 professors on the rightwing “Professors Watchlist”.
Remembering the Holocaust is an act of memory intended to honor the victims of fascism, but also an act of resistance meant to prevent the reoccurrence of such horrors. At the present moment in the United States, fascism has made a comeback and installed itself in the White House. There are many indications that the supposed electoral victory of Donald Trump was rigged up through fraud and treason. How exactly it happened is a matter for criminal investigators to unravel and one that likely will take some time to complete. In the meantime, it is the obligation of every thinking and decent American to speak up against and reject the abuses of the Trump-Pence junta, making clear this is an illegitimate regime that has seized power in not just questionable but thoroughly anti-democratic ways.
One of the tricks used by Trump to gain supporters is an old one that was popular in the Nazi Germany of the 1930s. It involved taking advantage of the despair and anger of working class people devastated by capitalist greed and its endless wars and depredations. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda (1933-1945), was one of the most notorious practitioners of that kind of chicanery. Who should be blamed for the misery of the German people after World War I? The Jews of course, so Goebbels and Hitler said. But World War I was precipitated not by the Jews but by the greed of German financiers and industrialists, arms dealers and megalomaniac madmen with delusions of racial superiority. Feeble-minded ideologues like Hitler and Goebbels had no trouble believing their own lies and spreading their hysteria to others like themselves.
The current global economic slump that has brought unemployment, homelessness, and lack of the basic necessities, including medical care, to so many people around the world is the result of a few individuals’ relentless profiteering and their constant movement of jobs and capital toward the areas of the world where the most gain can be realized at the cost of the suffering of others. Using dishonest mass media like the FoxNews, Breitbart, and other outlets of lies and misinformation, including Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, those who caused the global economic catastrophe set out to blame their misdeeds on others, including a variety of racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and other groups.
Did Mexicans take away the jobs of Americans? Did Muslims spread terrorism and violence around the world? Did immigrants ruin the good life in western countries? Most certainly not. America was built on the backs and hard labor of immigrants, Africans, Chinese, Mexicans, Irish, Filipinos, Vietnamese and many others. We owe a debt of gratitude to all of them. On the other hand, it was the likes of Donald Trump who exported American jobs to the hinterlands of misery where there are no government regulations or minimum wages. It was the world’s billionaires who have destroyed the environment and workers’ unions and who keep working-class people living in poverty and uncertainty. It was the American intelligence agencies that armed and trained fanatical religious extremists and put them up to do their dirty work. It is the oil industry and the weapons industry that keep the world in a state of constant and bloody warfare, indiscriminately murdering men, women and children and blaming it on others. It is the brutal disregard of the rich for the education and quality of life of common Americans that has made American cities and small towns alike into ghettos of filth, drug addiction and violence.
Who then should be held accountable for urban and rural squalor, global terrorism, chronic warfare, and mass unemployment? The answer is clear and unequivocal: it is Donald Trump himself and his fellow billionaires, politicians and business associates, including Charles and David Koch (Koch Industries), Richard and Betsy DeVos (Amway), Robert Mercer (Renaissance Technologies), Foster Friess (Friess Associates), and many others in the finance, oil and coal, armaments and defense, guns and pharmaceuticals, construction and chemicals, higher education and other industries that have gained from the losses of the public and who have done everything in their power to keep Americans ignorant and dispossessed, all along diverting the attention of the public away from themselves and toward scapegoats meant to carry the burden of their sins.
The rising waves of populism around the world are not unjustified. Working class people have indeed been victims of the evil schemes of those who thrive on their misery. What is lacking in the current political scene is the proper and accurate identification of the perpetrators of these crimes. Once that is done, the masses of the people should have no problem bringing their grievances to their doorway and demanding, and exacting, the due retribution.