Thursday 26 January 2017

Is Trump like Hitler or just like America?

American President Trump has already signed some Executive Orders, in an effort to roll back ex-President Obama's accomplishments and legacies: climate change and environment, supporting NGOs who are pro-abortion, block on visas from Muslims countries (the same countries the great America has directly invaded or indirectly interfered in), and to build a wall along the US-Mexico border (to name a few). The social media newsfeed are abuzz with alarming and distressed opinion articles, Lamentations and Editorials, and American friends' gung ho updates about marches and how to get organised. Even before Trump got elected and during his campaign trail, he was constantly likened to Hitler. Why Hitler? Why not just ordinary white original European settlers who invaded North America, pillaged the land, massacred the original inhabitants and stole their land and made them prisoners on the same piece of earth? Why is he like Hitler?! 

Trump bellows, brags, boasts, threatens, and performs chest-thumping antics the likes of which are, sirs and madams, really his own. Western journalism and fine culture, cinema and writers, for GOD's SAKE, can we please stop comparing any atrocity to Hitler, World War 2 and the Holocaust. Please compare atrocities and crises to slavery, colonialism and primitive accumulation. 

There is such a vehement and self righteous rebellion against the idea of Trump by liberal Americans that they can't stand this misogynist and racist caricature of a man, of a leader but isn't the real America merely floating to the top again? Didn't America's nascent democracy limit the participation of women and, was perfectly fine with slavery? Didn't American suffragists themselves claim they would rather cut of their limbs than allow black folks to vote? 

Watching United States' politics has made me realise that America's story is really the story of the Native Americans, Black folks and rest of the brown people who have made that country and, the suffering they have had to endure, still.

1 comment:

  1. I totally agree - I don't get the Hitler reference at all. Trump is many things, none of them good, but Hitler he isn't. Also we are now lumping fascism, Nazism and dictatorships all as the same thing - and applying them to a fundamentally way too capitalist state. All things lose their meaning if we no longer define them.

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