America's Despot: Donald J. Trump-The Tip of the Iceberg

Newark NJ

13 January, 2021

9:54 AM

Description

Donald J. Trump, the duly elected 45th President of the United States of America, helped to orchestrate a failed coup d'état to stop democracy on January 6, 2021. Every four years, after the national US Presidential elections are over in November, the US government passes the electoral votes through the Senate in Congress to certify the winning presidential candidate as the official American President. This is America's democratic process for the executive branch of the US government. The Trump supporters' organize an American coup to stop this democratic process. This happened in the millennium to a country that boasts to the world as the bastion of democratic ideals in the world. Fascism manifested its ugly head in the US. The ideology behind it was white supremacy, and xenophobia. Human family, particularly my Black family, don't be shocked by the current turn of events. This is America. The United States, and western culture, have a very long history of white supremacy, systematic racism, despotic leaders, totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, and anti-democracy. And both Republicans and Democrats use racism to maintain white hegemony in America to oppress and control the lives of Black and Brown people, such as slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, voter suppression, cointelpro (counter intelligence program) operations, mass incarceration, discrediting Afrikan history and culture, and non payment of reparations. The correct analysis of American and world history will help us understand the deep racial and class divisions that exist in the US. Unfortunately, these conditions are still being played out in America. These conditions catapulted Republican Donald J Trump to the office of the US Presidency in 2016. Although Trump lost his bid to be re-elected as president to Democratic President-Elect Joe Biden in 2020, Trumpism, a movement based upon white supremacy, xenophobia, and fascism, is in the land. His political base is not going anywhere in America. Remember, Trump received over 74,000,000 votes. Trump Republicans, his supporters, conservative media outlets, conservative Democrats, far-right ideologues are still here in America with us promoting White supremacy, xenophobia, and anti-democratic worldviews. They have not disappeared. Many of them are our everyday mothers, fathers, grandparents, uncles, aunts, barbers, coaches, landlords, neighbors, teachers, principals, lawyers, judges, military personnel, police chiefs, rappers, artists, clergy members, professors, writers, commentators, athletes, philosophers, philanthropists, and business CEOs. They have not gone everywhere. They will continue to organize people in America to promote a racist anti-inclusive and anti-democratic agenda. But we must remember history. President Donald Trump did not come out of a vacuum. America has had many racist government officials that prevented real democracy. White supremacy gave birth to US Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson racist beliefs about Afrikan people. They worked to deny the freeing of Afrikan Americans from slavery at the start of the United States of America. Both of these White men wrote into the US Constitution on 1789 "legal" protections for the American enslavement of Black people. It took a full scale US Civil War, and a new written American amendment called 13th Amendment of 1865, to end slavery in America. It was White supremacy that inspired US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney to lay the foundation for the limitations of democracy for Black people. Taney ruled on the famous Dred Scott case. He said, "They [Black people] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the White race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics."Since Dred Scott was taken to two freed states (e.g. Wisconsin and Illinois), he sued for his freedom in the US Supreme Court. Unfortunately, he lost his case. The US Supreme Court ruled against him. Powerful White people on the benches of the US Supreme Court did not see Black people as human beings. The case was dismissed and Dred Scott was returned to enslavement. Later in that same year, Scott's previous owners bought him and set him free. However, gave more power to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. White supremacy formed in the consciousness of Jefferson Davis's mind to become the President of the Confederate States of America. His leadership was the inspiration for many White people in the south to rebel against the United States in an effort to maintain the enslavement of Black people forever in 1861. His presidency sparked the American Civil War. The Republican Abraham Lincoln, the President that ended American slavery, reassured pro slavery Americans during the his famous Stephen Douglass debates that he did not favor equality of Black people. Lincoln once said, "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races … I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." Andrew Johnson, the 17th President the United States after the Civil War, was a serious white supremacist. He did everything in his power to undermine US Reconstruction. Johnson once said in 1866, "this is a country for White men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for Whitemen." White supremacy dictated to Democratic US President Andrew Jackson to kill many Indigenous people. He was praised for being "a Indian killer." Jackson once said "never met an Indian he liked or felt obliged to respect." President Jackson waged war on the Creek and Cherokee indigenous peoples to take their land. Under his leadership, US troops exterminated large numbers of Native Americans, including women and children. As president, he signed the Indian Removal Act. This law forced 46,000 Indigenous people out of their homes and onto reservations in the western territories. Many thousands of Naive Americans were killed in the process. Ardent White supremacist Woodrow Wilson became a US Democrat President and the President of Princeton University in New Jersey. But before his rise to the Whitehouse, helped to co-author of the policies of American Segregation. After the Civil War and reconstruction, US segregation legally denied civil liberties and democracy to Black people for nearly 100 years. Wilson once said, "[Reconstruction government was detested] not because the Republican Party was dreaded but because the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded."His racist views and policies help to make the Afrika American community a permanent underclass in the United States. White supremacy capitulated US Republican President William McKinley to become an Imperialist leader in the world. After successfully defeating Spain in the Spanish - American war. The United States acquires some of Spain's colonies such Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The Filipino people fought with America to defeat the Spanish in hopes of winning their freedom and independence. But McKinley had other desires. His White supremacy made him believe that the Filipino people were too inferior to run their own country. Therefore, President McKinley took the Philippines in a brutal war of racial aggression. His justification was that the Filipino people were, "unfit for self-government." McKinley's racist statements did not stop there in public records about Filipino people. He said he wanted to "uplift and civilize and Christianize them." In the 20th century, Black leaders were moving masses of Afrikan Americans for independence from White domination. Unfortunately, White supremacy's policing policies came on the scene to work to destroy Black democratic voices of resistance and Black self-determination. In the 1950s, steps were taken by a secret racist government program that was put in place to completely annihilate Black people's march toward Black power in the 1950's, 60's, and 70's called the US Counter Intelligence Program ( COINTELPRO). The FBI's COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) worked at destroying any and all Black Liberation Movements that came up in the Black community to restore our broken Black Identity, to rebuild Afrikan culture, fight for land, and a flag to represent the Black Nation. They attacked, discredited, and neutralized Black leaders and Black revolutionary movements such as lthe Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam; Malcolm X his organization called the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU); Dr. Martin Luther King and Civil Rights Movement Jr; Huey P. Newton and the Original Black Panther Party; Robert Williams and Revolutionary Action Movement; kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael); Dr. Maulana Karenga and the Organization of Us; and the Republic of New Afrika Movement. The FBI, state, and local police were successful at removing Black leaders, creating Black disunity, discrediting Black nationalism, and Black radical organizations from leading positions in Afrikan American community. The following is an excerpt of the Count Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) created by white supremacist J. Edgar Hoover, the former F.B.I Director from 1935 to 1972. The memorandum says, "The FBI Sets Goals for COINTELPRO. Under Director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) was aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political groups within the United States. In the 1960's, COINTELPRO's targets frequently included civil rights activists, both those who espoused non-violence, like Martin Luther King, and those that Hoover referred to as "black nationalist hate groups," like the Black Panthers. This document outlines the program's goals in attempting to limit the effectiveness of such groups. In practice, the FBI used infiltration, legal harassment, disinformation and sometimes extra-legal intimidation and violence against King, the Panthers, and other black activist groups in its attempt to discredit and disrupt them.GoalsFor maximum effectiveness of the Counterintelligence Program, and to prevent wasted effort, long-range goals are being set.1. Prevent the COALITION of militant black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real "Mau Mau" [Black revolutionary army] in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.2. Prevent the RISE OF A "MESSIAH" who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a "messiah;" he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammed is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed "obedience" to "white, liberal doctrines" (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.3. Prevent VIOLENCE on the part of black nationalist groups. This is of primary importance, and is, of course, a goal of our investigative activity; it should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Program to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.4. Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community. The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically in three ways. You must discredit those groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to "liberals" who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalist [sic] simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement. This last area requires entirely different tactics from the first two. Publicity about violent tendencies and radical statements merely enhances black nationalists to the last group; it adds "respectability" in a different way. 5. A final goal should be to prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth. Specific tactics to prevent these groups from converting young people must be developed" (https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/814). The racism of J.Edgar Hoover killed, exiled, criminalized, and imprisoned the lives of many innocent Black nationalist leaders. US Republican President Ronald Reagan was responsible for the elimination of many progressive social safety net programs in the 1980s. White supremacy made him view Black people, and people of color, as subhumans. In the Atlantic Journal article titled, "Ronald Reagan's Long-Hidden Racist Conversation With Richard Nixon." Presidential historian Tim Naftali writes in The Atlantic, "The day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People's Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States. "Last night, I tell you to watch that thing on television as I did," Reagan said. "Yeah," Nixon interjected. Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: "To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes!" Nixon gave a huge laugh" (https://amp.theatlantic.com/am... ). President Donald Trump and the movement for Trumpism are note alone in their White supremacy. White racist government officials have been a part of every level of the American government since the begging of the country. Many of them have worked covertly and overtly to abridge the principles of democracy in America, especially in the Afrikan American community. There are too many to name in the history of America. However, their White supremacist world views and policies have left the door open for present day racists in America like Donald Trump. Even within the western world, White clergy played a huge role in America exposing white supremacist beliefs in America. Reverend Buchner H. Payne, an American theologian, said in 1867, "God is light, and in him was no darkness at all.... And if God could not be the father of the Blacks, because he was White, how could our Savior, being the express image of God's person....carry such a demand of color into heaven, where all are White, much less to the throne." As quoted by John G. Jackson in his book called-Ages of Gold and Silver page 218. Reverend Dr. Henri Junod, a Swiss Protestant missionary, wrote in 1931 that Black people, "are an inferior race, a race made to serve." As quoted by J.C. DeGraft-Johnson, in his book called-African Glory page 51-52. In conclusion, we as citizens in America must never let democracy be compromised by anyone or anything. All people in America must unite to protect democracy. But we as Black people, and oppressed people of color, must always remember to work to defend democracy from America's versions of White supremacy and violent white supremacist forces hell bent on keeping Black and Brown people at the bottom of US society. Unfortunately, white supremacy and violent white supremacist terrorists (i.e. the Klu Klux Klan) have played a large role in justifying White hegemony and Black oppression in American history. Therefore, as Black people, and people color, our human right to democracy and self-determination are directly tied to the struggle to maintain democracy in America. Hotep (An ancient Afrikan word for peace)! -Bashir Muhammad Akinyele is a History and Afrikana Studies teacher at Weequahic High School in Newark, NJ. He is also the co-coordinator for ASCAC's (the Association for Study of Classical African Civilizations) Study Group Chapter in Newark, NJ. (https://ascac.org/) Note: Spelling Afrika with a k is not a typo. Using the k in Afrika is the Kiswahili way of writing Africa. Kiswahili is a Pan -Afrikan language. It is spoken in many countries in Africa. Kiswahili is the language used in Kwanzaa. The holiday of Kwanzaa is celebrated from December 26 to January 1.