Sliding into the abyss
John Cassidy at the New Yorker on Trump’s verminspeak:
If the phrase “live like vermin within the confines of our country” sounds vaguely familiar, it should. In February, 1933, days after Adolf Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany, Wilhelm Kube, a Nazi politician, wrote in a propaganda publication, as reported at the time by the Jewish Daily Bulletin: “The Jews, like vermin, form a line from Potsdamerplatz until Anhalter Banhof. . . . The only way to smoke out the vermin is to expel them.” In 1936, when Oswald Mosley’s British Fascists were harassing Jews in London’s East End, they referred to them as “rats and vermin from the gutters of Whitechapel.” Hitler himself used similar language more than once. In a 1934 interview, he said, “If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!”
…
Until 2020, Trump reserved his most offensive language for undocumented immigrants. During the 2016 campaign, he referred to them as “drug dealers,” “criminals,” “rapists.” From the Oval Office, he referred to them as “animals,” and in a 2018 tweet he said that Democrats wanted them “to pour into and infest our country, like MS-13.” This dehumanizing rhetoric went down well with many of Trump’s hard-core supporters. He also made derogatory comments about prominent Black figures, calling Representative Maxine Waters “low I.Q.” and Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, “dumb.” He referred to Baltimore, a predominantly Black city, as a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess.”
It goes down well with his supporters, but it goes down well with him, too. He likes that kind of thing. Why? I don’t know, it seems to be just who he is. He’s a mean angry sadistic resentful guy with no inhibitions and no conscience. In turn it seems that half the population love that about him.
All Presidential contests are important, of course. But this one is shaping up as a struggle for the future of the country—a struggle in which one of the major political parties is under the control of a would-be strongman, who, during his Veterans Day speech, also took the opportunity to praise the governing styles of Xi Jinping and Viktor Orbán. It’s a struggle in which the former President’s associates are reportedly busy preparing post-election plans to staff the Justice Department with Trump loyalists who are willing to target his opponents; to invoke the Insurrection Act and dispatch the military to political demonstrations; and to build giant camps to hold undocumented migrants. In other words, it’s a struggle to prevent the election of a President whose embrace of fascistic imagery and authoritarian governance goes well beyond what comes out of his mouth. That, unfortunately, is where we are. The reality cannot be avoided.
All true.
But her emails!
I’ve been listening to the Bulwark Charlie Sykes podcast for a while out of interest as to how the conservative never-trump crowd are seeing things. It’s been interesting. A bit of muted ‘maybe we made some mistakes back in the 80s and 90s’, but their attitude towards Trump et al is something I think all of us would agree with.
The episode a couple of days ago was a discussion with George Conway. They were appalled at the use of vermin, and ascribe the choice of that specific word to someone other than Trump – who as a New York slum landlord would have automatically used the vernacular ‘rat’. Sykes bet was Stephen Miller, which certainly has a ring of truth to it.
If Trump wins, in fact if the Republican party is not crushed, the democratic west is in very deep trouble.
Headline in today’s Guardian:
‘Elon Musk agrees with tweet accusing Jews of ‘hatred against whites’
A brief quotation:’ A tweet posted by @breakingbaht on Wednesday night read: “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
‘The billionaire owner and CTO of X, formerly Twitter, responded the same evening: “You have said the actual truth.” ‘
No doubt Coel willl be along to pretend that this is all OK, that Elon’s a great guy, and that this is all a misrepresentation by the ‘Elon-haters’. If he make an appearance, I hope he will respond to (and not studiously evade, as he did before) my request that he should provide us with a brief definition of the word ‘race’ as it pertains to the human species, and a list of human ‘races’, with a brief acount of how they differ from one another,. After all, he has proudly pronounced that ‘Race is real’.He needs to explain why he thinks this is so.
Rob#2 – yes, I also admire the Bulwark and Charlie Sykes.
Ew.
I think that the “democratic West” will be fine with an isolationist USA. In fact, it will probably prosper under the better leadership of Europe; fewer wars, fewer “interventions” in other nations’ governments, and a greater emphasis on the environment, society, and the welfare of the many, not the few.
I foresee a new Golden Age where the American empire collapses under its own weight, where Mexico retakes its old territory, and where a new American Civil War results in the creation of two new Americas, vastly weakened and its people humbled.
Rev…..Except right wing politics is rife in Europe too. See:Finland. See how one of our regular commentators on this very blog defended AdF. Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Italy. Which European country is going to lead the world into the light?
Would also note Europe is facing demographic collapse. Every European country is facing serious lack of births.
Someone’s forgetting how fucking secure the oceans have been with the US Navy unchallenged throughout almost the entire world. Global shipping would go straight to hell if the United States becomes that isolationist (which is the future David French seemed most worried about in “Divided We Fall”). The collapse of the American hegemony is a lot like climate change (despite being a significant factor); so many more systems would fail.
AdF? You mean the Alliance Defending Freedom? Who defended that? One regular agreed with its take on men in women’s sport, but one can agree with one opinion or action of X without defending X as a whole. Or do you mean someone else? If so who where?
@BrianM
Again, I have no problem with that. There are already far too many people on this planet, a reduced birthrate, worldwide, would be a good thing; conserve resources, reduce pollution, and fewer wars over land and resources.
Much of that is funded, or at the least, inspired by the USA. Left wing governments are undermined at every turn by an aggressive US machine. In South America, Africa, and the Middle East, they can be overt, but simply because their work is covert in Europe doesn’t mean it ain’t happening there, too.
@BKIS
How so? Naval blockades of Cuba, et al? US Warships providing intelligence to Israel as it continues ethnic cleansing of Palestine? US “Coastguard” patrolling the Taiwan Strait? US Navy ships boarding foreign cargo vessels at will?
Just where are these foreign navies the US has had to fight to defend shipping lanes?
You’re making the same argument that Great Britain once made, and it falls at the same hurdle. Naval power isn’t about protecting shipping lanes, it is about ensuring unfettered access to plundered resources.
@Ophelia #10:
It’s ADf I think (Alternative for Germany) that is being referred to…
‘Much of that is funded, or at the least, inspired by the USA.’ I personally have no idea if this is true, and don’t have an opinion – but it is odd to hear European populist groups mouth slogans and state opinions that clearly originate in and are far more relevant to the peculiar circumstances of American politics than to anything actually going on in their countries (e.g. UK groups making a big deal about abortion, an issue that pretty much no one in the UK cared about until recently and which is still struggling for traction, or any European populist group using American language about and categorisation of ‘races’).
I think, guest, that ‘Much of that is funded, or at least, inspired by the USA’ is true to quite an extent in the UK. There are in London a number of ‘think-tanks’ that are partly funded by American money and espouse strongly certain American ideas about how the economy should be run (the think-tanks’ greatest success was, of course, the recent trussing of the British economy); and certainly one idea held by the leading Brexiters was that Britain should cast off the EU shackles and get back into jolly old Anglo-Saxondom, jolly-rogering it around the world with their English-speaking mates, and sticking the resulting dosh in tax havens that were once part of that glorious and incorruptible institution, the British Empire.
As for ‘race’, yes: for the internet provides a nice festering hotbed, with such websites as Stormfront and the chat forums on 4chan & 8chan, which were all, I think, originally American, the result of which has been to encourage racists everywhere to exchange their thoughts, influence one another, and pretend to find a scientific basis for their prejudices; this allows them to seize on dubious as well as ill-understood & misrepresented scientific papers that they suppose support their racist ideas – ideas which are nothing new and whose provenance lies in 18th & 19th century Europe, its colonial empires, and its construction of a a pseudo-science that allowed Europeans to suppose that, being at the apex of the racial hierarchy, they had the right to bugger up everybody else’s lives .
@15 What interests me about the ‘race’ conversations in Europe is that the facts on the ground here have little or nothing to do with the racial history of the US. There are lots of ‘racial’ (or more correctly ethnic) tensions and specific issues in various European countries, but we’re not actually genuinely talking about these; instead we’re talking about ‘black lives matter’, police brutality, and other issues much more salient to African-Americans.
Blood Knight @ 13, thanks. If AfD (not ADf) is what Brian meant I still don’t know what he’s talking about. A search of comments for Alternative for Germany turns up only your comment.
Brian: who here has defended Alternative for Germany?
There is a massive difference between a declining birthrate and a population collapse. With more women, having fewer babies doesn’t necessarily lead to a decrease in population at all; and could even continue to lead to an increase if, say, all the 2.1 (instead of, say, 2.4) babies per woman reach reproductive age. If women are, on average, having fewer than two babies (say, 1.9) who reach reproductive age, then the population will, very slowly, start to shrink – but at nothing like the rate of increase during my lifetime (it has more than tripled).
I find that people who claim to be concerned about population collapse have either been duped by racists (who mean ‘white women aren’t having as many babies as those other ones’) or are actually racists themselves and want to hide it (not very well, in my opinion). Europe is not going to suffer a population crash. Growth for the sake of profits on a finite planet is a stupid notion. Europeans come in all ethnicities; not just white.
I think he’s thinking of https: //www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/guest-post-there-is-a-narrative-worth-exploring-here/
Ah, thank you!
I’m always very glad to have local informants, so I’m likely to boost their comments to make the local information that bit more visible. That’s a very information-rich post. It doesn’t defend AfD, it provides information about it.
Yes. “demographic collapse” is not the same as “population collapse.” The current number of humans is a very recent aberration brought on by a combination of a massive, one-time injection of fossil fuel power that underwrote a wave of technological advance, along with the rollback of the diseases that had until recently helped keep our numbers much lower. We became addicted to both. Our dependence upon cheap energy has enabled the development of a global civilization with an economy largely predicated on continuous growth. Part of that continuous growth is increase in the human population (at the expense of the rest of the biosphere). This has occurred in an incredibly short time, during a period of remarkable climate stability which we are in the process of ushering off the stage through our own headlong rush for more. We’re reaching the point where our techno-optimism (or techno-blindness) is about to face a hard wall of material limitation that it can’t blow through with reckless overconfidence. It is still an open question if our limited wisdom can rein in our thoughtless cleverness in time to prevent the inevitable population collapse that will be the inescapable outcome of the cascading crises of resource depletion, climatic instability, and environmental degradation which our meteoric rise has precipitated. That answer is coming a lot sooner than many of us anticipated, as the future pounds on our front doors, smelling of smoke, looking for something to eat and drink.
Speaking of Americans fueling the European right, look who appeared at a right-wing rally in Madrid recently.
He gave his reason for being there with no apparent sense of irony:
To be clear, I do not support Catalan independence, and the referendum seven year ago was illegal. But the independence movement is dying out in Catalunya (the Socialists received the majority of votes there in the last election), it was never violent to begin with, compromises need to be made to form a government in a parliamentary system, and it’s perfectly within Sánchez’s power to seek amnesty for the organizers of the referendum. This is democracy in action.
(A totally irrelevant aside: I lived on Calle Ferraz just a few blocks from PSOE headquarters for a couple of years. Never could roll my “r”s, which always made it difficult when I needed to take a taxi home.)
tigger_the_wing #18
The people worried about population collapse that I’ve read claim to be concerned about birthrates near 1 per couple rather than just under 2. They point to Japan, S. Korea, and China as facing economic collapse because those countries won’t have enough people of working age to support the retired. They see those countries as merely the worst cases & European countries as facing similar if less drastic problems.
Whether such concerns are justified is another matter.
It’s certainly true that a world population of 2 to 4 billion would not be a disaster. It seems plausible that a fast population contraction would cause problems.