"Hate has no place in
our country, and we're going to take care of it."
Donald Trump after
giving condolences to shooting victims and their families on August 4th.
Seriously!
The interesting feature of modern warfare
is what we euphemistically call “asymmetrical combat.” Stateless warriors, hit
and run targets, focused on imploding political systems, instilling fear to
provoke reactions and recruit additional adherents, and assemblages of those
led by maniacal leaders – charismatic slogan-driven militants with fire in
their eyes and hate in their hearts – joined by pop-up lone-wolves acting on
their own in seeming synchronicity with a perceived greater movement. Hating
minorities, blaming them for the ills of a nation, is hardly new. Every
demagogue, every rising autocrat, throughout history has built and consolidated
his (yup “his”) power based on targeting hapless others as the bane of their
nations’ everyman.
Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao,
Castro, Khomeini, Assad, bin Laden, Al Baghdadi, Ghaddafi come to mind as those
who began as outcasts and rose through blame and violence to positions of
power. Others hold their power through violence and blame. Putin, Maduro,
Burma’s (Myanmar’s) generals, African strongmen, etc., etc. There always has to
be a “good us” vs a “bad them.” Winners and losers. No consensus. One group
must dominate another, one group accorded “legitimacy” while another is
“unpatriotic” and the “root of the problem.” Blame.
Unification is the enemy for these
autocrats. They rely dramatically on a divide and conquer strategy, fall
quickly when their populace stabilizes and finds accommodation through
compromise and consensus. They simply cannot thrive in a true, balanced and
functional democracy. Without severe polarization, forcing people to pick sides
with zeal and commitment, they cannot survive or hold power. Roping in the
military or police power helps as does delegitimizing aspects of their own
governments, structures they are committed to take down anyway, that could
serve as barriers to their ascendency and retention of power.
Until the most modern era, nascent
dissents were forced into clandestine meetings – rife with risk as informants
could easily penetrate these organizations. Then came the Internet and smart
phones. Social media dominated. So many websites. So many ways to reach the
disenfranchised, loners seeking vindication. Automated targeting – bots – made
the task of identifying and reaching those vulnerable to the message easy to find,
easy to target.
And for those violently inclined in
the past, almost uniformly relegated to explosives vs guns. After all,
explosives can be manufactured from the simplest components, even ordinary
fertilizer can be rigged to detonate, and industrial dynamite easy to come by.
Regime changes loosed all manner of military-grade explosives, even chemical
and biological weapons (and a few lose nukes), and the arms market flourished,
for the right price, for AK-47s and RPG launchers. Then came AR-15s and their
ilk.
Identifying minorities is relatively
easy. Ethic names, choice of dress, a tendency to live in like-minded
communities, race or skin color, language, places of worship, place of birth or
a willingness to stand out as a spokesperson for the relevant minority group.
Once identified, shifting blame and building moral outrage is easy. In times of
destabilizing change – where globalization and automation are totally
reprioritizing job-skill-values more than at any other time in human history –
those left behind or being left behind are desperately seeking simple lifelines
to return to what their life assumptions had always been.
Think of a farmer in the deep South
in the 1860s being told that he (yes, “he”) would no longer have the use of
exceptionally cheap slave labor to earn a living. He was ready to fight and die
rather than accept the change. We don’t have slavery today, but the
economic/work displacement is just as severe. The patterns of generations of
labor, from great grandfather, to grandfather, to father to son, are now broken
by modernity.
For who say that Donald Trump is a
racist, they really cannot make that statement without the deepest
psychoanalysis of the President himself. He may actually be deeply “un-racist.”
What he is, whatever his true beliefs might be, is willing to exploit racism to
exacerbate a vast political divide, extreme polarization, in order to maintain
political power. Throwing in statistics on GDP (an average number boosted by
rich people making much more) and unemployment (excluding those who cannot find
any work and have given up or those severely under-employed) provides an
argument for his reelection, but the immutability of this base constituency.
Muslim Americans, inner-city African
Americans living in violence well-below the poverty line and undocumented
Hispanic immigrants have not remotely cost jobs or decimated the U.S. economy,
quite the opposite. But they fit the bill as perfect targets.
“Socialism” – particularly as that
word is callously misused – can be used to tear apart the opposition, at least
in this country. Paying for healthcare for all is done in every other developed
country on earth, except the United States. Simply put, it’s hard to argue that
the United States cannot replicate a viable universal healthcare system when
the entire developed world has been operating with such systems for years.
Environmental protection is not a Chinese hoax… those wildfires, tropical
storms, droughts and flooding… consistently rising temperatures… have the most
consistent direct relationship to increases in greenhouse gasses.
The United States is the only
developed country on earth with virtually the same number of guns in private
hands as it has people. More assault weapons in private hands than the entire
population of many European nations. And a clear and oft-repeated justification
for allowing such assault weapons to proliferate (by no means constitutionally
protected) as a check on a government that might veer too far away from “core
American values.”
Donald Trump is acutely aware of this
sentiment. He has delegitimized the mainstream press, his own intelligence
agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Environment Protection
Agency. He is sworn to take down these institutions and to the maximum extent
possible, replace them with Trump-supporting alternatives. But taking extreme
positions, finding hidden enemies, amplifies that required political
divisiveness and justifies extreme measures.
Since 9/11/01, the tsunami of mass
killings in the United States has been deeply and fundamentally driven by what
we euphemistically call “domestic terrorists,” a label that is never used by
Donald Trump. His explanation is to ignore the patterns of rising mass
shootings, almost all with those legitimate military grade assault weapons, and
label each as a deranged psychopath acting from some form of mental illness.
There may even be a ring of truth to the required mental aberration to
implement a mass killing. But that so many mass murderers are clearly linked
either as unambiguous supporters of the President or passionately committed to
the annihilation of those ethnic and racial targets who are the unambiguous
targets of Donald Trump’s blame game… suggests that what is really happening is
an acting out of Trump’s deepest message. “Good people” on both sides.
With the ascendency of Donald Trump
came an acceleration, a spike, in hate crimes, hate speech and related domestic
terrorism. There are more semi-automatic weapons in circulation today than at
any other time in our nation’s history. El Paso, August 3rd. 20
murdered, 26 injured by a white supremacist hell-bent on carrying out his
president’s subliminal message. Dayton, August 4th, 9 dead, 27
injured. Two days. So what is really happening here? Domestic terrorism or a
slow explosion of a civil war? Joe Biden, old Joe Biden, had said what many
Americans – right, left and center – intuitively already think. The United
States as we know it will not survive a second Trump term. Enough blame on
those with mental illness. Enough of those “our thoughts and prayers are with
the families of the victims.” Enough! The hate you give…
I’m
Peter Dekom, and sometimes the acceleration of what might otherwise pass for
random… is no longer random.
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