Donald Trump Is Writing A Terrifying New Chapter In The History Of Political Repression
In his Mount Rushmore
speech, Trump sings the sweet tune of the traditional American myths of a
divinely inspired people who spread onto and beyond a frontier that made them
free. Missing in Trump’s tale are the many other peoples who were crushed,
enslaved, overrun and ethnically cleansed to make that freedom possible. The Manifest Destiny
mythology originated from Jacksonian political writer John O’Sullivan, who in
an 1845 article advocating for annexing Texas from Mexico, declaring it “our
manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the
free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” O’Sullivan’s “our” meant,
almost exclusively, Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent.
President Thomas
Jefferson invoked such myths in his promise that he would help provide the
Anglo-Saxon people “room enough” to reach a “final consolidation” when the land
would be populated with white Northern European settlers from sea to shining
sea. Historian Frederick
Jackson Turner would codify a more progressive vision of Manifest Destiny in
his 1893 paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The
frontier’s “free land” provided “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past”
and a safety valve for domestic pressures that gave birth to a unique American
identity and spirit. Turner’s progressive twist was that this identity was open
and available to all peoples of the world, not just Anglo-Saxons.
But the land they
wanted to spread into wasn’t free. It was occupied by indigenous tribes.
American independence, as the Founding Father imagined it, was cramped from the
beginning by the mere existence of Indians. To achieve white freedom, Indians
had to be removed. And in order to justify it, Americans dehumanized
them. “Indians were the
first people to stand in American history as emblems of disorder, civilized
breakdown, and alien control,” Rogin wrote in 1987. “Differences between reds
and whites made cultural adaptation seem at once dangerous and impossible.
The
violent conquest of Indians legitimized violence against other alien groups,
making coexistence appear to be unnecessary.” Freedom and
demonization and repression went hand in hand. And so it was with racialized
slavery. …
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/donald-trump-portland-american-repression_n_5f231c9cc5b68fbfc8809a1d?ri18n=trueGeorge Monbiot: Ayn Rand - A Manifesto for Psychopaths
