Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: an Appeal in a Time of Darkness |
Still from David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997).
So, here we are on the precipice. Not just CounterPunch, but the country, even the 30% who refuse to believe it. Indeed, we may well be off the precipice, suspended in air above the chasm, like Wile E. Coyote, as the icy grip of gravity takes hold, pulling us down into political darkness.
Is that dark pit we’re being dragged into “fascism”? I’m reluctant to use that word to describe the retrograde policies and savage tactics of the Trump regime. There’s no reason to import a European ideology from the last century to explain a domestic political pathology that can be traced back to the origins of the Republic.
In fact, what if we’re entering a dispensation that’s even worse than “fascism”? Worse, you say? What could be worse than fascism?
How about a face-to-face confrontation with America’s own history, come alive on the streets of our largest cities, like armed zombies emerged from musty graves thought long buried.
Trump’s malignant genius is that while he’s furiously trying to whitewash American history at the Smithsonian, Gettysburg and Stonewall, he’s forcing Americans into a live-fire reenactment of some of its most nightmarish episodes.
The political antecedents of Donald Trump aren’t to be found in Weimar, Germany or the nationalist movements of post-WW I Italy, but in the authors of the Constitution, a document that not only condoned the ownership of human beings, but, through the 3/5s clause, gave a political advantage to the states whose economies were driven by slave labor. A constitution that doubled down on this ignominy in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, requiring the return of escaped enslaved people to their enslavers, even from states that had outlawed slavery. It’s hard to hide that from the kiddies. But the Constitution just set the stage for what followed…
The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in the Republic’s infancy (1798), outlawing “malicious speech” against the government and targeting immigrants as “enemy aliens.” (Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act as part of his program against immigrants.)
Thomas Jefferson signed the Insurrection Act into law in 1808. It’s been invoked by 15 presidents and General Douglas MacArthur, who thought he outranked the president, to suppress domestic dissent.
In 1831, Trump’s hero Andy Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act and began the forced relocation of 60,000 people from the so-called “civilized” tribes of the southeast, a death march that went on for 19 years known as the Trail of Tears.
In the Dred Scott decision (1857), the Supreme Court not only upheld the Fugitive Slave laws but also effectively ruled that blacks were subhuman and not entitled to any rights under the Constitution.
In the 1850s and a group known as the Secret Order of the Stars Spangled Banner (later known colloquially as the Know-Nothings) rose to political prominence through immigrant bashing, mainly of Irish Catholics, in the East who they slandered as corrupting the US political system.
During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and oversaw the largest mass execution in US history, hanging 33 Lakota men for defending their homeland from white land thieves.
Former Confederate officers, such as KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, waged a war of terror against blacks and Radical Republicans across the South for 12 years until Reconstruction was abolished and Jim Crow established, effectively eviscerating the “rights” of southern blacks that had been won under the 13th and 14th Amendments.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese workers from entering the US and preventing Chinese residents of the US from becoming citizens. The law wasn’t repealed until 1943.
In 1890, yes 1890!, the US Cavalry massacred nearly 300 wearing and near-starving Lakota people, including dozens of women and children, at Wounded Knee. Thirty-one of the murderers were awarded Medals of Honor for the slaughter, tributes recently reaffirmed by Pete Hegseth, who called the killers “brave soldiers” who “deserved their medals.”
The eugenics movement (backed by some of the nation’s leading corporations and tycoons) originated in the US in the late 1890s, first with laws prohibiting marriage by people the state considered “epileptic, imbeciles or the feeble-minded.” Then, in 1908, Indiana (then considered a progressive state) enacted the first forced sterilization laws for those the state deemed “mentally ill or retarded.” These laws became the template for the eugenics programs of the Nazis, as Hitler himself admitted, not the other way round.
In 1917, Mexican immigrants crossing the border at El Paso, Texas, were doused with the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon-B, more than two decades before the Nazis used it on Jews and other “undesirables” in the death........