Justin Raimondo has a
great piece, entitled “Trump: America’s Funhouse
Mirror,” subtitled “He’s not saying anything that hasn’t been
proposed before.” To summarize: Trump may be over-the-top in how he
says things, but he is saying nothing more than what has been said by others
before. Trump’s difference is one of style, not substance (a
shocking insight, I know).
It is a sobering read, only
because it is so true. Like Trump, Raimondo’s piece puts it right in
your face. What is the “it”? Trump is America – more
specifically, Trump represents what many Americans want, believe,
think. Trump is merely a manifestation of this desire. Trump’s
words are no different than what other politicians believe and say and do;
other politicians just find flowery (or deceptive) ways to say it.
It is a sobering read because
Raimondo puts in your face the picture of your neighbors, friends, relatives –
many of the people you know, and many of the people you don’t know.
The latest outburst of self-righteous indignation
directed at Donald Trump underscores what hypocrites Americans are, as well as
illustrating their seemingly endless capacity for self-delusion. This latest
eruption of moralizing is occasioned by Trump’s proposal that all travel by
Muslims into this country must be ended – “until we find out what the heck is
going on.”
Raimondo goes on to point out
that this call by Trump is just another plank in a building long ago
constructed – for example:
Yet Congress is set to approve a bill with broad
bipartisan backing that would deny visa-free travel to anyone who has been in Iraq or Syria in the
past five years.
Raimondo offers other
examples of supposedly outrageous Trumpisms that are outdone by the actions of
politicians and various security agencies every day – today.
And not just
today. Trump points out that it wasn’t just the Japanese that were
abused by Roosevelt during WWII.
“Take a look at Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526,
and 2527, having to do with alien German, alien Italian, alien Japanese. They
stripped them of their naturalization proceedings. They went through a whole
list of things; they couldn’t go five miles from their homes. They weren’t
allowed to use radios, flashlights. I mean, you know, take a look at what FDR
did many years ago and he’s one of the most highly respected presidents.”
As Raimondo ends the post:
The fear-mongering and war hysteria that has dominated
the American political landscape since 9/11 has come back to haunt our
Establishment – and they don’t like it one bit. This is “blowback” with a
vengeance, and it conjures in my memory this quote from a trenchant observer of
the march of human folly, Henry Louis Mencken:
“Democracy is the theory that the common
people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
I am not so sure that the
“Establishment” doesn’t like it. Anyone with half a brain knew that
the road being travelled could lead to this. (NB: there was a time
it seemed Trump was less warmongerish than the others; I am no longer so sure
about this.)
In any case, for me a couple
of other quotes come to mind. First, from Étienne de La Boétie:
Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined
on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be
deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields
are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in
such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem
that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families,
and your very lives.
All this havoc, this misfortune, this
ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you
yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for
whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who
thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no
more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in
your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him
to destroy you.
Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy
upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms
to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample
down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he
have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he
had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not
connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the
murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?
You sow your crops in order that he may
ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage;
you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your
children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows
— to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the
servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your
bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow
in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the
stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.
If that was too long, I offer
a summary from Senator Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of
the Sith (2005):
“So this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause.”
How weak this so-called
liberty. Since 911, there have been a total of 45 people killed by
so-called jihadist attacks in the US (including San Bernardino).
Or about one typical month in
Chicago.
