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      Two Deaths Raise the Specter of Lynching in California

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      On the morning of June 10, 2020, the body of a young black man, Robert Fuller, was found hanging from a tree in a park opposite City Hall in Palmdale, California. The police initially ruled the death a suicide. Suspicions were raised though when the body of a 38-year-old homeless African American man was discovered hanging from a tree in Victorville, a town some 50 miles south of Palmdale. Again, the police initially ruled the death to have been a suicide. A coincidence? Since these deaths occurred in the middle of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, it seems hard not to be suspicious. The FBI has now entered the case.

      Racially-motivated lynching was a primarily Southern and border-state phenomenon. The Tuskegee Institute’s database records some hundreds of these murders in the decades following Reconstruction. Until American entry into World War II in 1941, Southern mobs killed dozens of black people during the Depression decade. Since Congress was dominated by Southern legislators, bills seeking to make lynching a federal crime failed to be enacted into law. Astonishingly, this continues to be the case as of June 2020.

      Out of Fashion

      Despite violent Southern resistance to racial integration during the postwar civil rights era, between approximately 1958 and 1970, lynching went out of style. Race-based bombings and shootings took its place. Out of fashion but not out of mind. For example, on occasion, nooses were found in the lockers of newly hired African American policemen and firemen when they seemed to be breaking long-standing racial barriers in these professions.

      This brings us to Palmdale. Palmdale and the adjacent town of Lancaster are located about 35 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the Antelope Valley, on the edges of the Mojave Desert. These communities are close to Edwards Air Force Base, the site of flight-testing of advanced fighter planes during the Cold War — the early sequences in the film “The Right Stuff” were located at Edwards. Rents and housing prices are somewhat lower than those in Los Angeles. Palmdale-Lancaster attracts largely lower-middle-class residents who don’t mind living in a high desert environment surrounded by Joshua trees and tumbleweed. In recent years, these communities have attracted a growing number of African American families for the same reasons that drew whites to the area.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Palmdale-Lancaster has a political history that draws our attention. During the postwar era, John Wesley Swift, initially a follower of the Reverend Gerald L.K. Smith, a prominent anti-Semitic preacher, founded his own church in Lancaster in 1948. Like Smith, Swift toured southern California seeking to revive the Ku Klux Klan in the Los Angeles area and beyond. The effort met with some success: A cross was burned near Big Bear Lake shortly after Swift’s visit. Swift also played a major role in the formation of the California Anti-Communist League and the equally racist and anti-Semitic Christian National Crusade.

      Our interest in Swift’s ecclesiastical career is based on the fact he was crucial in the transformation of what had been British-Israelism — a religious doctrine that asserted British people were the descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel — into the new postwar American religion of identity. From his church in Lancaster, Swift preached that the Jews were the “seed of Satan” and that people of color were sub-human “mud people” who should be deported from North America and returned to their countries of origin in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

      One of Swift’s congregants at his church in Lancaster was Richard Girnt Butler, an engineer working at a Lockheed Aircraft facility in the area. Michael Barkun, in “Religion and the Racist Right,” reports that Butler found Swift’s sermons electrifying and quickly became an adherent of the new religion: “He [Swift] was the total turning point in my life. The light turned on. He had the answers I was trying to find.”  

      Of Particular Interest

      In 1973, Butler left Swift and his Lancaster church behind and formed his own Aryan Nations (and Church of Jesus Christ Christian) at a compound near Hayden Lake in Idaho. Butler’s departure and Swift’s later demise was not the end of Lancaster-Palmdale as a location for radical-right activities.

      Of particular interest are the Nazi Low Riders (NLR). Originally a prison gang and an offshoot of the more widely known Aryan Brotherhood, the NLR first appeared outside California penitentiaries — the California Youth Authority especially — in the early 1980s. Despite its name, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Anti-Defamation League and other watchdog organizations describe the group as both violent and essentially white supremacist rather than anti-Semitic. Specializing in illegal drug trafficking, the NLR has been able to recruit members beyond its original cluster of young ex-inmates.

      The NLR has also proven durable. As of 2019, the group was still active. So far as our suspicions are concerned, the Low Riders have been visible both in the Palmdale-Lancaster area and San Bernardino County, where the town of Victorville is located. Several years ago, NLR members were arrested for attacking a black man in Palmdale.

      The Low Riders are hardly unique. California abounds with what the SPLC labels as hate groups. According to the SPLC’s annual report, in 2019 there were 88 such groups active in the Golden State, many of them clustered in the Los Angeles area. Not all of them, though, are sufficiently violent to carry out a nighttime lynching. Those that do would include the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division and Feurkrieg Division, some of whose members have already killed opponents.

      It may be that the two deaths by hanging mentioned at the beginning of this observation were suicides, as the police concluded originally. Or, if murder was involved and these really were lynchings, the perpetrators need not have had an affiliation with an organized group. Still, given the current heightened atmosphere in the United States, it is hard not to be suspicious.

      *[The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right is a partner institution of Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Student Visa Debacle: All One Needs to Know About Trump’s Presidency

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      Let’s assume you had decided that American politics in the age of Donald Trump was simply too much, a risk of non-stop heartburn, high blood pressure and elevated angst. So, you checked out, perhaps burying yourself in literature or art, binging on TV or simply retreating somewhere off the grid. But November is fast approaching and, not wishing to neglect your patriotic duty to vote, it’s time to catch up now. But how?

      Just try digesting the bile fed the country and the world by Donald Trump! If only there were some way or some single issue that would make up for that time lost in your sublime isolation and could encapsulate all you needed to know about the leadership of Donald Trump without reading back issues of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist or this fair publication.

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      Lucky for you, there is. Consider the US decision on July 6 to cease student visa issuances to foreign students intending to study at any one of America’s 4,000-plus universities and colleges and hundreds of boarding and secondary schools in the event those institutions went to all-online classes as a result of the pandemic. The decision affected not only those first-time students starting their schooling in the US in the fall. It also would have impacted those already here studying, or perhaps in their respective countries or elsewhere abroad for the summer for jobs, internships, research or family and would not be able to return to complete their studies if their respective institutions moved toward all-online instruction.

      It’s All About Reelection

      The first lesson one would learn is that for Donald Trump, it’s all about his reelection in November. Obviously, schools out of session or forced to resort to online classes to minimize pandemic health risks would not be a good look for his campaign. Among so many other things, it’s imperative for him that students are back in school and parents and guardians are back on the job, creating the vital economy on which he’s staking his reelection. He has no other achievement on which he can count.

      How does he do that? That is the second lesson of this sordid affair. His administration has utterly failed to present a cogent, effective plan for combatting the virus, which would have reduced infections, hospitalizations and, most importantly, deaths, and would have allowed these institutions to reopen in the fall, as those in Europe are planning to do. In fact, he’s effectively surrendered to the virus and resorted to a trademark of his presidency: bully the target group into submission.

      For elementary, middle and high schools, that has meant threatening those that resort to online classes with loss of federal support monies. That could mean billions in lost income for public schools already facing horrendous budget cuts. For colleges and universities, it was the visa suspension or cancellation policy. That is, institutions open classrooms or lose the income from more than a million foreign students who study in the US annually. That amounts to some $41 billion in tuition, fees, boarding charges, etc. Some 425,000 jobs may also be at stake.

      Embed from Getty Images

      A third lesson in understanding the US administration is how it approaches major policy decisions affecting the nation and its people. There was no consultation, no outreach to university presidents or educational organizations, no public vetting in advance, no intergovernmental policy deliberation, not even proforma sounding of businesses to get their thoughts. Rather, Trump brandished the blunt club of student visas and held it over the heads of these institutions. It was Trump’s way, or pay.

      Moreover, little thought was given to the economic contributions of these foreign students to the economies where they live and study. Restaurants, bars, apartment complexes, car rentals and dealers, shops, barbers and hair salons, grocery stores and many other businesses had already suffered when the majority of these institutions closed in late winter and the spring to minimize the risk of COVID-19 on their campuses. Now, Trump was going to foreclose any possibility of these businesses salvaging the year. It was a thoughtless, self-centered push to bend others to his misguided, ham-fisted will.

      Put Up a Wall, Even Against Legal Visitors

      Lesson four, and not surprising, is that there was also no thought given to the intangible contributions that foreign students make to their institutions and communities in terms of exposure to different cultures, languages, ideas, values and perspectives, all of which contribute to the uniquely enriching experience of university study in the US. Inability to understand this contribution is another characteristic of the Trump presidency, its xenophobia. That was always evident from his constant drumbeat over erecting a wall along the US-Mexican border.

      There was yet a fifth lesson, this administration’s patent inability to foresee the secondary and tertiary effects of its decisions and resultingly to be caught flatfooted when they arise. In this case, the administration was clueless to the firestorm of reaction that followed the announcement of the visa policy. Institutions such as Harvard and MIT immediately mounted a legal challenge. Universities in 20 states and the District of Columbia joined together to file a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security. Petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of foreign and American students — the latter of whom vote, by the way — flooded the administration and Congress.

      Major professional associations representing university admissions and counselors also issued strong statements in opposition to the administration’s ill-considered move. Media had a field day pelting the administration with all manner of justified criticism of the policy. Even administration supporters, including Republican members of Congress, were left scratching their heads in wonder how this would make Trump look good or benefit the country.

      Of course, it didn’t. At all. The administration was forced to back down from the visa edict only days after issuing it. The decision to announce it in the first place was a blunder of colossal proportions and emblematic of a presidency and administration foundering, heedless to the needs of the nation or to the damage it does when it acts on virtually every policy issue based on distorted impulse or dyspeptic gut instinct.

      So, to our somnolent citizen seeking to exit the torpor of three and a half years of escapism, there you have it. While you blissfully slumbered, America was led by a bullying, single-mindedly reelection-obsessed, blundering, club-wielding, visionless xenophobe. Now, ponder those and the many other failings of this president and apply them to foreign policy, national security, economic policy, racial equality and justice, trade, climate policy and more, and you’ve got a pretty fair idea of the state of the country under Donald Trump. You’re all caught up!

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Price of America’s Complacency in the Face of COVID-19 Is Survival

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      On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered many businesses statewide to shut down in response to the raging resurgence of COVID-19 in nearly all 50 US states. That same day, a friend of mine landed in San Francisco after having spent six months living in Japan. On his flight, a United employee sitting behind him failed to wear a mask, as did numerous other people on the flight. No one said or did anything. Upon arrival, he was not asked where he had been or if he had any symptoms of the virus. His temperature was not taken and there was no mention of any requirement for 14 days of quarantine. He boarded a connecting flight and was on his way — six months after the pandemic that has ravaged the world began.

      Countries the world over have gotten so many basic elements of the battle against the virus right. Why not America? The unfortunate politicization of COVID-19, the failure to implement mandatory and consistent rules nationwide, the absence of rule enforcement, selfishness, laziness and a culture of silence are all combining to doom us to the consequences of our shared failure. Our collective apathy, complacency and idiocy are killing us.

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      Not long ago I was in Whole Foods, in the produce section where foods are not packaged, and a perfectly healthy-looking woman in her 30s was the only one not wearing a mask. No one said a thing until I approached her and said she needed to wear a mask and that it had been the law in Connecticut since April. I was told to mind my own business. It is my business, of course, and everyone else’s business in that store, yet no one said or did a thing as she continued to breathe all over the produce. I even went to store management and said something. They had to let her in because she said she had an underlying medical condition that prevented her from wearing a mask. It just so happens that the law in Connecticut allows for that exception, but no doctor’s note is required.

      There are plenty of reasons why America continues to lead the world in COVID-19 infections and deaths, but our own stupidity and selfishness have not been talked about much in the media. Every time we see someone not wearing a mask, or wearing it over one’s mouth but not the nose, or under the chin, we should be going up to that person and saying something. Every time. Our culture of silence is raging every bit as much as the virus in this country.

      So is local, state and national authorities’ failure to make mask-wearing and social distancing mandatory in all public places throughout the country, backed up by enforcement, which is a critical ingredient that is missing. Many governments across the world have backed their policies with strict enforcement measures and fines. That is why countries such as China and South Korea have been able to successfully battle the virus, and why Morocco, which just started doing the same, now has a reasonable chance of beating down infection rates.

      America is capable of doing all this, but the politicization of the virus and silly interpretations of what freedom of action means under the US Constitution have prevented us from following their example. Yes, you are free to take your own health and life into your own hands by being stupid and selfish, but you are not free to do the same with someone else’s health and life. And that is what the “Live Free or Die” movement and conspiracy theory believers among us fail to acknowledge.

      Every one of us needs to remind ourselves that other peoples’ actions impact us, and start to act accordingly. Say something when you see someone not wearing a mask in public, or failing to wear it properly. If everyone did so, those who are failing to do so would stop. The majority of us who are now wearing masks and social distancing have the power, but our own complacency is preventing us from taking control of inconsiderate fellow citizens. We have a responsibility to ourselves and everyone else to say something. We should also be putting pressure on lawmakers to crack down on violators and enforce mandates.

      Until America gets smarter about how to battle the coronavirus, we will continue to lead the world in infections and death, and we will deserve it. We have only ourselves to blame for being so dumb and failing to take corrective action. America has the resources to get COVID-19 under control, especially if we start treating this as a war and start acting like our collective survival depends on it — because it does.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      America Is a Nation in Darkness

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      As America’s 2020 Independence Day fades from memory, many things are clearer. Americans love to go to beaches and bars as their petri dishes of choice, masks are a better idea than they were before Independence Day, there will never be a national pandemic response as long as Trump is president, and it is beyond time for Trump to wear a ball gag in lieu of a mask. It is also clear that way too many Americans know way too little about the history of their nation and even less about the birth of the nation.

      Independence Day is celebrated on July 4, the date in 1776 when the Continental Congress ratified the text of the Declaration of Independence. However, it is a safe bet that most Americans know more about the contents of a margarita than they do the Declaration of Independence.

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      Some will note Thomas Jefferson’s stirring words near the beginning of the document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

      Practically no one will know that immediately following these words, the Declaration goes on to state: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  

      Much of the rest of the document is a list of grievances against the British king and his minions leading to the conclusion that the colonies should be free and independent states absolved of any allegiance to the British Crown and free of any political connection to Great Britain. So there you have it, a quick history lesson. But before moving on to the US Constitution, pause a moment and actually think about what should be the cornerstone of this document: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

      We know that the “self-evident” language was never actually self-evident, and that the notion that all men are created “equal” remains at the core of America’s living historical lie, birthed even before there was a Declaration of Independence. But the part that presents the solution, the path forward, is a declaration that government deriving its powers from the consent of the governed should be how a nation organizes itself to provide for and protect its sovereignty and its people, how it defines and enables life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

      Broken Government

      Now with America’s national government completely broken, the consent of the governed nowhere to be found, and the actual right of the people to alter or abolish their government at issue with every new and imaginative effort to suppress voting, the Declaration of Independence rings hollow. But if it means anything today, it is to be found in the concept that human beings living within some demarcated landmass should be free to institute a “new” government around a set of principles and organizational mandates required to protect public safety and provide some foundation for societal well-being.

      There have been times before, and surely now it is America’s time again — the time to wrest power from the corrupt and corrupted, the venal and the vengeful. There is Trump’s Independence Day performance, practically begging the nation to again take up arms against itself. There is significant social unrest because aged institutions have failed for centuries to include a huge swath of those supposedly equal folks. There is the daily inventory of undermined governance rendering the present government incapable of protecting public safety and promoting social well-being.

      And most of all, there is the sight of our government “leaders” standing by unmasked as the fools that they are, while death and disease permeate the land. I want to be clear about this: Trump has blood on his hands, McConnell and most Republican politicians at the national and state levels have blood on their hands. And, those around Trump who have enabled his vile ignorance to prevail have blood on their hands. America’s present government is literally draining the life from this land.

      Today’s catalog of legitimate grievances is even stronger than those of 1776, for they demonstrate just how far the nation has strayed from its lofty ambition. Today, when we well know that the words “all men are created equal” rang hollow then but seem even more devoid of meaning now, the failure to fight hard enough for that ideal in modern times dwarfs the earlier willingness to fight for words that meant so much less then.

      A New Revolution

      Without wishing for a renewed revolutionary war, I do wish for a new revolution. The time has come to stop America’s national retreat from an imperfect union to an even more imperfect union. In a nation that loves its Constitution, just reading the Preamble should be enough to know that the text to follow has failed us miserably: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

      Not one objective set out in that Preamble to the US Constitution is happening now. The institutions brought to life by that document in the text that follows are not working today to meet any of the lofty goals set forth in the Preamble. Think about it, read each one carefully, reflect on gaping societal divisions, reflect on today’s attorney general, reflect on marchers in the streets demanding racial and social justice, reflect on US allies discarded like vermin, reflect on poverty and lack of access to meaningful health care laying waste to many, and reflect on warriors in our streets supposedly “protecting” us from ourselves.   

      It is truly unfortunate that the world had to watch a black man die in the street before our eyes amid a raging tableau of disease and despair for many finally to see what America has become. When national institutions born centuries ago fail so completely to protect lives and save lives, they have failed in their original purpose.

      Now is the moment for we the people to argue loudly that the time has surely come to fundamentally alter what we have and replace it with something much better.

      *[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Mount of Autocrats

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      Donald Trump would dearly like to add his face to Mount Rushmore as the fifth presidential musketeer. His fireworks-and-fury extravaganza on July 3 was the next best thing. Trump’s dystopian speech was almost beside the point. Much more important was the photo op of his smirking face next to Abraham Lincoln’s.

      More fitting, however, would be to carve Trump’s face into a different Rushmore altogether. This one would be located in a more appropriate badlands, like Mount Hermon in Syria near the border with Israel. There, Trump’s visage would join those of his fellow autocrats, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. To honor the illiberal locals, the stony countenances of Bashar al-Assad and Benjamin Netanyahu would make it a cozy quintet.

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      Let’s be frank: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are not the company that Trump keeps, despite his “America First” pretensions. His ideological compatriots are to be found in other countries: Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Narendra Modi of India, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Viktor Orban of Hungary and so on. Alas, this global Rushmore of autocrats is becoming as crowded as a football team pressed together for a selfie.

      But Putin and Xi stand out from the rest. They get pride of place because of their long records of authoritarian policies and the sheer brazenness of their recent power grabs. By comparison, Trump is the arrogant newcomer who may well not last the season, an impulsive sprinter in the marathon of geopolitics. If things go badly for Team Trump in November, America will suddenly be busy air-brushing 45 out of history and gratefully chiseling his face out of the global Rushmore. Putin and Xi, however, are in it for the long haul.

      Leader for Life

      At the end of June, Russia held a referendum on a raft of constitutional changes that President Putin proposed earlier in the year. In front of Russian voters were over 200 proposed amendments. No wonder the authorities gave Russians a full week to vote. They should have provided mandatory seminars on constitutional law as well.

      Of course, the Russian government wasn’t looking to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion of governance. The Russian parliament had already approved the changes. Putin simply wanted Russian voters to rubber-stamp his nationalist-conservative remaking of his country.

      At the same time, a poor turnout would not have been a good look. To guarantee what the Kremlin’s spokesman described as a “triumphant referendum on confidence” in Putin, workplaces pressured their employees to vote and the government distributed lottery prizes. Some people managed to vote more than once. On top of that, widespread fraud was necessary to achieve the preordained positive outcome.

      Instead of voting on each of the amendments, Russians had to approve or disapprove the whole package. Among the constitutional changes were declarations that marriage is only between a man and a woman, that Russians believe in God and that the Russian Constitution takes precedence over international law. Several measures increased executive power over the ministries and the judiciary. A few sops were thrown to Putin’s core constituencies, like pensioners. Who was going to vote against God or retirees?

      But the jewel in the crown was the amendment that allows Putin to run for the presidency two more times. Given his systematic suppression of the opposition, up to and including assassination, Putin will likely be in office until he’s 84 years old. That gives him plenty of time to, depending on your perspective, make Russia great again or make Russia into Putin, Inc.

      The Russian president does not dream of world domination. He has regional ambitions at best. Yet these ambitions have brought Russia into conflict with the United States over Ukraine, Syria, even outer space. And then there’s the perennial friction over Afghanistan. Much has been made in the US press about Putin offering the Taliban bounties for US and coalition soldiers. It’s ugly stuff, but no uglier than what the United States was doing back in the 1980s.

      Did you think that all the US money going to the mujahideen was to cultivate opium poppies, run madrasas and plan someday to bite the hand that fed them? The US government was giving the Afghan “freedom fighters” guns and funds to kill Soviet soldiers, nearly 15,000 of whom died over the course of the war. The Russians have been far less effective. At most, the Taliban have killed 18 US soldiers since the beginning of 2019, with perhaps a couple tied to the bounty program.

      Still, it is expected that a US president would protest such a direct targeting of US soldiers even if he has no intention to retaliate. Instead, Trump has claimed that Putin’s bounty program is a hoax. “The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party,” Trump tweeted.

      Knowing how sensitive the US president and the public are to the death of America soldiers overseas, Putin couldn’t resist raising the stakes in Afghanistan and making US withdrawal that much more certain. Taking the United States out of the equation — reducing the transatlantic alliance, edging US troops out of the Middle East, applauding Washington’s exit from various international organizations — provides Russia with greater maneuvering room to consolidate power in the Eurasian space.

      Trump has dismissed pretty much every unsavory Kremlin act as a hoax, from US election interference to assassinations of critics overseas. Trump cares little about Ukraine, has been lukewarm if not hostile toward US sanctions against Moscow, and has consistently attempted to bring Russia back into the G8. Yet he has also undermined the most important mechanism of engagement with Russia, namely arms control treaties.

      President Trump’s servile approach to Putin and disengaged approach to Russia is the exact opposite of the kind of principled engagement policy that Washington should be constructing. The United States should be identifying common interests with Russia over nuclear weapons, climate, regional ceasefires, reviving the Iran nuclear deal — and, at the same time, criticizing Russian conduct that violates international norms.

      Territory Grab

      China’s Xi Jinping has already made himself leader for life, and he didn’t need to go to the pretense of a referendum on constitutional changes. In 2018, the National People’s Congress simply removed the two-term limit on the presidency and boom: Xi can be on top ‘til he drops. Forget about collective leadership within the party. And certainly forget about some kind of evolution toward democracy. Under President Xi, China has returned to the one-man rule of the Mao period.

      So, while Putin was busy securing his future this past weekend, Xi focused instead on securing China’s future as an integrated, politically homogeneous entity. In other words, Xi moved on Hong Kong.

      Hong Kong once had great economic value for Beijing as a gateway to the global economy. Now that China has all the access to the global economy that it needs and then some, Hong Kong has only symbolic value, as a former colonial territory returned to the Chinese nation in 1997. To the extent that Hong Kong remains an enclave of free-thinkers who take potshots at the Communist Party, Beijing will step by step deprive it of democracy.

      On June 30, a new national security law went into effect in Hong Kong. “The new law names four offences: secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces,” Matt Ho writes in the South China Morning Post. “It also laid out new law enforcement powers and established government agencies responsible for national security. Conviction under the law includes sentences of life in prison.”

      The protests that have roiled Hong Kong for the past many months, from Beijing’s point of view, violate the national security law in all four categories. So, violators may now face very long prison sentences indeed, and police have already arrested a number of people accused of violating the new law. The new law extends to virtually all aspects of society, including the schools, which now must “harmonize” their teaching with the party line in Beijing.

      What’s happening in Hong Kong, however, is still a dilute version of the crackdown taking place on the mainland. This week, the authorities in Beijing arrested Xu Zhangrun, a law professor and prominent critic of Xi. He joins other detainees, like real-estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang, who was linked to an article calling Xi a “clown with no clothes on who was still determined to play emperor” and Xu Zhiyong, who called on Xi to resign for his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

      Meanwhile, Beijing’s treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang province amounts to collective punishment: more than a million consigned to “reeducation camps,” children separated from their families, forced sterilization. Uighur exiles have charged China with genocide and war crimes before the International Criminal Court.

      Like Putin, Xi has aligned himself with a conservative nationalism that appeals to a large portion of the population. Unlike Putin, the Chinese leader doesn’t have to worry about approval ratings or periodic elections. He is also sitting on a far-larger economy, much greater foreign currency reserves, and the means to construct an illiberal internationalism to replace the Washington consensus that has prevailed for several decades. Moreover, there are no political alternatives on the horizon in China that could challenge Xi or his particular fusion of capitalism and nationalism.

      Trump has pursued the same kind of unprincipled engagement with China as he has with Russia: flattery of the king, indifference toward human rights and a focus on profit. Again, principled engagement requires working with China on points of common concern while pushing back against its human rights violations. Of course, that’s not going to happen under the human rights violation that currently occupies the White House.

      And Trump Makes Three

      Trump aspires to become a leader for life like his buddies Putin and Xi, as he has “joked” on numerous occasions. He has similarly attacked the mainstays of a democratic society — the free press, independent judges, inspectors general. He has embraced the same nationalist-conservative cultural policies. And he has branded his opponents as enemies of the people. In his Rushmore speech on July 3, Trump lashed out against:

      “… a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

      He went on to describe his crackdown on protesters, his opposition to “liberal Democrats,” his efforts to root out opposition in schools, newsrooms and “even our corporate boardrooms.” Like Putin, he sang the praises of the American family and religious values. He described an American people that stood with him and the Rushmore Four and against all those who have exercised their constitutional rights of speech and assembly. You’d never know from the president’s diatribe that protesters were trying to overthrow not the American Revolution but the remnants of the Confederacy.

      Trump’s supporters have taken to heart the president’s attacks on America’s “enemies.” Since the protests around George Floyd’s killing began in May, there have been at least 50 cases of cars ramming into demonstrators, a favorite tactic used by white supremacists. There have been over 400 reports of press freedom violations. T. Greg Doucette, a “never Trump” conservative lawyer, has collected over 700 videos of police misconduct, usually violent, toward peaceful demonstrators.

      As I’ve written, there is no left-wing “cultural revolution” sweeping the United States. It is Donald Trump who is hoping to unleash a cultural revolution carried out by a mob of violent backlashers who revere the Confederate flag, white supremacy and the Mussolini-like president who looks out upon all the American carnage from his perch on the global Rushmore of autocrats.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      A New Hysteria Around History in the US

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      In its report on US President Donald Trump’s Fourth of July weekend in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, the Associated Press characterized his speech as “a direct appeal to disaffected white voters four months before Election Day.”

      While Trump himself “zeroed in on the desecration by some protesters of monuments and statues across the country that honor those who have benefited from slavery, including some past presidents,” the AP notes that Kristi Noem, a Republican governor, “echoed Trump’s attacks against his opponents who ‘are trying to wipe away the lessons of history.’”

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      Americans suddenly seem obsessed with history, which used to be dismissed simply as “the past” and subjected to the proverb, “It’s no use crying over spilt milk.” So, what could the phrase “the lessons of history” possibly mean to a contemporary American?

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Lessons of history:

      1) From a historian’s point of view, the nuanced conclusions that can be reached about the possible meaning of events in the past, including the unintended consequences of decisions made by historical persons or institutions 
      2) For the layman in the United States, the simplistic chauvinistic anecdotes and bullet points dispensed in schools, especially when the content derives from books published in Texas

      Contextual Note

      As a prominent actor in what will soon be called an epoch of history — the Trump era — the president is living proof that obtaining a degree from Wharton doesn’t require a solid appreciation for or understanding of history. According to John Bolton, the former national security adviser, Trump may still be ignorant of the fact that the United Kingdom acquired nuclear weapons nearly 70 years ago and that Finland declared independence from Russia more than a century ago. Perhaps those two events took place in the too distant past to pique his curiosity or have so little bearing on today’s geopolitics that they merit forgetting.

      Bolton is not the only commentator to maintain that Trump’s grasp of history or of geopolitical reality is less than impeccable. But just as the killing of George Floyd in police custody has sparked a vast movement of people seeking to reevaluate some salient aspects of US history, Trump has decided that though he may not understand it, he has the duty to defend “history.” He appears to see it as a damsel in distress, bound by the villain to railroad tracks as the locomotive steams toward the captive in the kind of cliffhanger Trump probably remembers from his exposure to the history of cinema.

      Trump is right. History has long been manhandled in the US. And this is the moment to honor it. After all, the history of the now-globalized human race has taken a highly visible turn at least since 2001, with a notable acceleration since Trump was elected in 2016. Given the stakes, Americans should finally not just invest in history’s defense but inject it with the life it deserves. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      To defend history, the best place to begin is to examine the methodology of historians. The word itself is borrowed from French, where the noun histoire signifies both “history” and “story.” History as a discipline can justifiably be described as an imperfect version of the most accurate and complete story we can honestly tell about the past after having examined all the available evidence.” In some sense — on the storytelling side — it’s a discipline closer to literature than science. But Trump refuses to see it as a discipline, preferring to treat history as political advertising. Advertising also tells a story, though no reasonable person would call it a discipline.

      Why is this important? Because the citizens of such a comparatively youthful nation have never really known what to do with history, especially their own history. Among the myths that Americans are taught in school is the idea that the American Revolution sealed the definitive rejection by a forward-looking people of the stale, sclerotic traditions of Europe, whose nations were the prisoners of their history. America was all about creating a new civilization, not adulating the past. With such a vision, even the idea of the past became permanently irrelevant to a people on the move.

      Trump complains that the protest movement is no more than “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.” The opposite is of course true. History has already been wiped out of Americans’ field of awareness. History has actors, not heroes. Some stand out symbolically as either heroes or villains, at least for the sake of storytelling.

      Concerning the erasing of values, the famed “Puritan values” the US has traditionally been proud of were long ago replaced by the pursuit of wealth and fame, the two values that have guided Trump’s own life story. As for indoctrinating the children, some of us have an idea of what indoctrination looks like. Many of us were taught at school that Christopher Columbus’ contemporaries believed that the world was flat (false) and that a teenage George Washington, after castrating his father (i.e., chopping down his “favorite” cherry tree), proudly proclaimed, “I cannot tell a lie” (ridiculous).

      Speaking as if preparing his political supporters for battle, Trump declared that “just as patriots did in centuries past, the American people will stand in their way, and we will win, and win quickly.” Time is, after all, money, and short episodes of history are easier to commit to memory. 

      “[W]e will not be tyrannized, we will not be demeaned, we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people,” Trump added, imagining the mustachioed villains clad in black (with skin color to match) who have conspired to bind the damsel to the rails.

      Historical Note

      Donald Trump didn’t just complain. In a bold gesture, he announced an executive order to create a “National Garden of American Heroes” with his own list of obligatory denizens of the garden, the criterion being that they must be “historically significant Americans.” 

      The problem with this approach is that if history is reduced to stories about heroes, the damsel history would remain bound to the tracks. Heroes of various kinds do exist, but because they are deemed heroic, their stories take us outside of history into something closer to dramatic fiction. Worse, heroes can only be understood as champions of some collective endeavor — a cause, venture, belief or even an art form — that students of history need to come to grips with before they can assess the relative virtues and contributions of the heroes. There is little doubt, however, that the idea of celebrating heroes as role models would appeal to the host of a former reality-TV show called “Celebrity Apprentice.”

      Asawin Suebsaeng and Allison Quinn at The Daily Beast describe Trump’s drift as nothing less than a call for a new civil war. But the conflicts Trump typically cites tend to be the war of independence and World War II. The Daily Beast tells us that Trump repeatedly found ways “to compare himself and his supporters to Patriots during the American Revolution—and protesters to members of the British Army.” 

      But Trump then shifted his allusion to the 20th century and World War II when he declared “there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” He even glanced at China’s Chairman Mao Zedong: “[T]his left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.” Heroes are important, but so are recognized villains.

      Trump’s understanding of history resembles a jigsaw puzzle in a tempest where the wind has blown away most of the pieces. Interpreting the scattered ones that are left requires an imagination guided by whatever fantasies happen to be tumbling around in Trump’s unconscious. To be fair, that pretty much corresponds to the way the lessons of history tend to be written by totalitarian regimes. In the end, Trump may be far more normal than people give him credit for.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The City on the Hill Has Lost Its Shine and Its Bounce

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      In a dramatic headline, Yahoo News expresses its surprise if not dismay that a “staggering 62 percent of Americans no longer see America as Ronald Reagan‘s ‘shining city on a hill.’” Yahoo and YouGov published their poll to give an idea of the mood of the nation on this year’s Fourth of July weekend. The […] More

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      Why Has Islamophobia Risen in America?

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      Islamophobia in the US has increased ever since the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Discrimination and hate crimes against American Muslims skyrocketed immediately after the deadliest assault on US soil took place. Despite sporadic efforts by former President Barack Obama to bridge the religious and racial divides, anti-Muslim prejudice was further heightened after the election of […] More