Aether wrote:I don't disagree with that we are all the human race, nor do I disagree that racism, or bigotry and/or xenophobia have lasting affects. It still isn't racism with the examples you provided. There is a spectrum: racism, bigotry, prejudice, and bias. This is all but forgotten. Supposedly, white people are only capable of racism. Other races who say/do the same thing toward whites is "only" bigotry, yet if one minority says/do something against another minority then it is upgrade to racism. Or is it only still considered to be bigotry? I'm confused with the relative racism purported by the left nowadays. Pardon me if I simply call bullshit.
I find it interesting that you use the passive voice so much here.
The passive voice has an interesting feature: it lets you write sentences with no subject. Normally, a coherent sentence in English has a subject, a verb, or an object: "I eat pizza." There is a clearly defined process of eating, a specific person to do the eating, and a specific thing that is eaten.
But with the passive voice, you can say "pizza is eaten,"
without knowing who ate the pizza.
One of the rhetorical uses of the passive voice is to blame other people for what you
think is happening. You can do this regardless of whether it's actually happening in real life. And regardless of whether you know who's responsible, even if it
is happening.
Was every German during Hitler's rule a member of the Nazi party? I don't think so, but they were still used as foot-soldiers against Hitler's enemies; Germans soldiers still killed an died for something they "maybe didn't really believe in." Oh, sure, he got Germany out of crushing inflation, paralyzing political gridlock, a national identity crisis, and Made Germany Great Again(tm), and it only cost....
Bill Maher actually came out and said that he wished the left didn't lambast McCain and Romney as racists. John Stewart remarked on the liberal hypocrisy of treating all of Trump voters as one racist monolith. Michael Moore's Trumpland was a discussion with Trump supporters. Moore even said himself that he understood why people are angry; especially at the lack of jobs. For the record I know those types of jobs are not coming back in a global ecomony. But it's easier to do to throw shade at an entire group of people who made the same choice but out of different reasons. Some are racists. Others poo-pooed what they saw as over the top rhetoric. Still others are ignorant and didn't believe, in their opinion, was a biased media against an outsider. You may certainly disagree with Trump and feel that many of them were bamboozled (as I do), but your comparison to the rise of Hitler and Germans as culpable is a gross hyperbole.
You missed the point of the comparison.
The point is, if you enable a leader to do a bad thing, when you
really should have known better than to back him... Exactly how much of the responsibility for his actions can you deny? Can you claim that just because you aren't fanatically devoted to everything he does, you're in no way responsible for the fact that he did bad things?
People who voted Trump into office are not, as a rule, Nazis...
but they have some explaining to do. Because "Yeah, I was really mad and this orange guy said that we could fix my problem by building a wall and deporting all the Muslims and that it would be great if that psychobitch he was running against went to jail" is
not an excuse for supporting someone who does terrible things.
Using the example of the World War Two Germans illustrates the point very well- most of us agree that the German people showed culpable negligence, and willful blindness to the evil they were enabling. The Germans themselves were very uncomfortable with that after they'd had time to sit down and think about what they'd done. In hindsight, even they look back and think "How could we have been so gullible as to support Hitler?" Many of them did have misgivings, or saw the warning signs... but out of a misguided sense of nationalist loyalty they did not
act on their misgivings. And therefore, their misgivings became irrelevant.
And a lesser echo of this can reasonably be applied to almost every corrupt or malevolent political figure in history.
Some Republicans
didn't vote for Trump, because his vile character and lunatic policies disgusted them. A lot of independent voters reacted the same way. For those who did, the question is "You
knew he was a vile person, and unless you were as ignorant and irresponsible as a small child you must have had reason to wonder if his policies could be implemented. You
knew he was making broad racial generalizations about groups of people that are in almost all cases harmless and innocent. You
knew he had the support of lunatic racists, and probably for a reason. So what were you thinking?"
Citizens in a democracy have a responsibility to know who and what they support, and to comprehend the realistic consequences of policies proposed by the people running for office. If you can't be a
thinking voter, you don't deserve to be a voter at all.
But I do agree with you that he has bamboozled his supporters especially with jobs and "Draining the Swamp." He has emboldened a small portion of the electorate who are legitimate racists and the other people who he fooled will find out real soon how well they had it under Obama.
Yes- but if we as a nation are going to learn from this, we do have to be willing to ask some hard questions. Like "what thought process led me to willingly abet this sack of filth's path to the White House, and how can I
never make a mistake like that again?"
We will not escape this problem with the same kind of thinking that got us into it. And as individuals we won't learn anything from the disaster if we don't resolve to change our ways.
.