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American far-right taps into base instincts, unhealed wounds to further agenda of elites
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I was reading Mr. Lam’s article (“No justice, no peace in US: Police brutality undermines Uncle Sam’s image abroad,” July 14, Shanghai Daily) when news of yet another mass killing of innocents — this time in France on the occasion of Bastille Day — flashed across my screen!
These are, indeed, horrific days!
America, my America, has, unfortunately, long been a violent land, and myths of heroism too long entwined with firearms and those who wield them.
While tribalism — the deeply rooted instinct in our species to identify and group together with people of “our kind” — is certainly a factor in many of the killings today, in the US and elsewhere, it is also occasioned by various poisonous strands of ideology, in some cases racist, in others rooted in ethnicity or religious belief.
The US continues to labor under the burden of the chattel slavery imposed upon blacks imprisoned and shipped here under the most monstrous conditions.
While the origin and continuation of this system was primarily economic — it allowed for the concentration of wealth in the landed aristocracy of the South prior to the Civil War — it also had its ideological and social stratification aspects.
Because almost all of the slave-holders and traders were nominally Christians, elaborate justifications for slavery were developed around “proof” from Scriptures and arguments that some races were less developed than others. White supremacy was taken for granted and slavery was but one mechanism to keep the “others” in their place.
Furthermore, as I discovered as a graduate student, although most Southerners never owned slaves, almost all of them supported the institution because it provided a class structure wherein even the poorest white person had someone below him.
This is a powerful psychological imperative to maintain a system that, in one way or another, benefited practically everyone who was not black.
The US has never really come to terms with this, not only the reality of the deep chasms out of which we expected former slaves to climb basically on their own, but also to the degree that white prejudice permeates our culture.
We keep wanting to believe that “the past is the past” and that we have “gotten beyond” the deep harm that slavery did to all of us. Clearly, though, we have not, and it is our continued refusal to deal with this as a people that is part of the ongoing instances of discrimination and outbreaks of violence.
Despicable reason
But there is another, even more despicable reason for America’s quandary today: the large number of cowardly, lying politicians who both explain away the truths of racial divides, even as they use them to advance in power.
I have watched in dismay as the far right has not only systematically increased their power within their party, but also how they have skillfully played upon the fears of black violence into blanket support for their agenda — an agenda that, while containing much “red meat” for whites who fear they are losing “their country,” nonetheless overwhelmingly favors the welfare of the obscenely rich.
When we so desperately need straight talk and vigorous action to address long-festering grievances — among people of color as well as whites who have been left behind by uncaring capitalists — we are, instead, faced with lies from the puppets of the wealthy elite.
Until we have the equivalent of some kind of national awakening — and I do not hold my breath waiting for it — there will be more hatred and more violence.
As the statesman Edmund Burke once said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [persons] to do nothing.”
America has been led into a spiritual desert by false prophets. But as I scan the horizon in hope, I see only dust devils and mirages of empty lakes!
The author is a retired statesman from US.
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