Racism and Sadism from the USA

Romare Beardon work on American lynchings

Targeting immigrant populations for imprisonment, expulsion and defamation is indecent.

This is precisely why Donald Trump's racist chief political advisor drafted the Muslim ban last week—as a means of appealing to white racists and discouraging minority populations from living free from fear.

Nothing sells like fascism to white racists.

When Republicans cheered for Trump to "lock her up" last year, they meant it. Republicans would like to imprison political opponents and minorities who have been and remain a problem in need of a lasting solution by a brave leader.

That this latest act of cowardice is sadism is a fact lost on most Americans ignoring the nature of the Republican enterprise. Inflicting punishment is a tenet of fascism.

See the text of "Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States," now removed from the White House website that has been turned into a propaganda site for Trump.

By Juan Cole

Picking on immigrants and refugees is the act of a sadistic bully, since they are the one fairly large group of residents of the United States whose constitutional rights are disputed. The executive order Trump signed late on Friday suspending entrance to the United States for citizens of seven countries and cancelling the US refugee program for four months is probably illegal. The 1965 immigration law forbids discriminating against immigrants on the basis of nationality. ...

The political goal of the order was to whip up anti-Muslim hatred. No immigrant from any of the seven countries Trump named has been guilty of terrorism on US soil in this century. ...

The executive orders signed this past week by Trump appear in the main to have been drafted by alt-Neo-Nazi Steve Bannon, the Rasputin of this administration. ...

In another in a series of coups, Trump on Saturday kicked the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff off of the principals committee of the National Security Council. They will attend only when their expertise is required. He then appointed Bannon to that key body, which advises the president on national security issues. Knowledgeable intelligence and military leaders will therefore often not be in a position to contradict Bannon on the NSC, giving him enormous unchecked and unelected power (NSC staffers also don’t have to be confirmed by the Senate). NSC staffers have been known to ask the CIA to do illegal things like go after Americans on American soil, and I think we may expect a lot of that sort of thing in this administration. Bannon is the CEO of the far right extremist purveyor of fake news, Breitbart, today’s equivalent of the Völkischer Beobachter, the newspaper of the national socialist workers party in 1930s Germany.

The way Bannon crafted the executive order on immigrants that the pliant Trump eagerly signed was guaranteed to be a disaster. It would have been easy enough to say that the provisions would come into effect one month hence. Instead, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was instructed to apply its provisions immediately. This step caused some over 100 passengers to be arrested on arrival and put in holding cells at the airport on Saturday, even though they had a valid visa or green card (permanent residency). Thousands of persons with valid visas or green cards (permanent residency, the last step before citizenship) who happened to be abroad on Friday were effectively locked out of the country. These included nearly 200 Google employees caught abroad on Saturday, whom the company was trying to get back into the country.

One of the first to be arrested, at JFK, was Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an Iraqi who had served as an interpreter for the US army in Iraq. Despite Darweesh’s own patience with it all, that he was one of the first to be arrested gave the Trump-Bannon piece of fascism a further black eye. Darweesh’s vital work put his own life in profound danger and he helped avoid casualties among our troops. For him to be humiliated and handcuffed and reduced to tears spoke volumes about the true nature of the executive order.