COMMENT POSTED TO A CARTOON BY CHRIS RIDDEL IN THE GUARDIAN
AND PROMPTLY REMOVED
Alone on his pedestal [showing Trump doing a Nazi salute]
The cartoon reflects a cheap sentiment endlessly repeated in
our press.
I don't like Trump. He is close to a complete failure.
But it is inaccurate and pretentiously precious to call him
a Nazi.
And the entire press focus on Charlottesville is close to
absurd.
Two ugly mobs were permitted to assault each other by a
terrible police force.
Who really is to blame?
As for perspective, ten times that violence happens every
weekend on the streets of Chicago as black gangs shoot each other, sometimes as
many as 50 being hit by bullets in a weekend. (If you think I’m exaggerating,
see the official stats presented with graphics: http://heyjackass.com/
)
I don't see any weeping and gnashing of teeth in our press
over that regular and far bloodier event.
The one person killed in Charlottesville, and her death
involved a bizarre set of circumstances, carries no meaning beyond that
involved in dying by a stroke of lightning – that is to say, being in the wrong
place at the wrong time.
A young man from Ohio attending the crazed festivities, a
man of sub-normal intelligence – it is reported that he couldn't even pass the
mental requirements for joining the American Army, and, believe me, that is
saying something - crashes his car into a crowd, and he does so not from any
apparent intention to kill or maim but in a panic trying to escape a crowd
threatening him in his car, a crowd armed with clubs, beating on his car and
having smashed the windshield, a crowd of the people supposedly opposed to
fascism.
The only lesson from this squalid event is that authorities
should have controlled the situation from the start, and they did not even try.
There are idiots on both sides of such events in America,
covering the range of the KKK to BLM, a movement that has done many stupid and
dangerous things over its short life.
But over and above that, I am far more concerned about so
much attention and energy focused on what was, in the scheme of things today,
almost an insignificant event.
America bombs people in half a dozen countries. It supports
mercenary terrorists in places like Syria. It has destroyed a number of
societies over the last 15 years in the Middle East, killing something on the
order of 2 million and driving millions from their homes as hopeless refugees.
It catapulted a democratic Ukraine into a bloody coup and
civil war. It threatens a peaceful, rule-abiding Iran. It threatens to invade a
democratic Venezuela in its induced turmoil.
It threatens North Korea. It runs tanks and fighters right
up to the border of Russia, a peaceful state.
And it runs an industrial-scale assassination program -
initiated by that former president with the boyish smile a lot of people still
regard as a worthy person - a program that puts the efforts of the old
Argentine junta to shame in their efforts at "disappearing" people
legally guilty of nothing.
And, as The Guardian itself found, America's police kill
more than 1,100 of their own people each year.
America is simply an extremely brutal place - all of it -
and one that frequently behaves in insane fashion, as when it slaughtered 3
million Vietnamese for the sin of wanting to reunite their country which had
been artificially divided under American influence.
Trump is a terrible leader, but so no more so than Pelosi,
Gingrich, Graham, Schumer, Clinton, and a whole crowd of American national
politicians who support all the horror.
