Liberals and progressives may comfort themselves imagining our current administration* orchestrated by a fulminating wretch perched tensely on a toilet angrily tweeting juvenile spite in the wee dark hours of every empty morning.
But the taunting provocative threats of nationwide armed raids against migrants with deportation orders should frame this image in a much bleaker and more dangerous context. What is being spun above us is more than improvised performative cruelty intended to roil a racist base of bitter, sullen, and hair on fire revanchists whether they manifest as comfortable retirees, lost soul unemployables, or anxiously overworked members of the growing precariat.
Some very clever, and nominally well educated, “masterminds” are assiduously generating similar razor wire policy options for the grifting bully now soiling the sleeping places of people like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While trimp soaks up emoluments with more suction force than a terrorized squid exerts to spurt foul black protective ink, crafty “advisors” are gleefully generating copious new policy menus of an atrociously similar ilk.
Clearly, communities across the nation are rallying to protest the promised raids as well as to protect their designated victims. And as “masters of war” well know, the anticipation of “shock and awe” can generate terror, despairing enervation, and all manner of rash miscalculation.
The power of the nativist trimp backlash is, in large part, contingent on a sense of victimhood.
Honest, white, good, hardworking, Germans (er I mean “Americans”!) are being WRONGED by illegals who break the laws just by being here even when they DON’T take OUR jobs and murder/rape OUR women/children. The invasion by these swarthy disease-ridden hordes is facilitated by sanctimonious left-wing extremists who have NEVER valued hard work, the glorious homeland or its pure values (both the latter of which are vividly reified whenever thick toothed blond children raise their voices in innocent joyful song).The (barely) latent fascism of trimp enablers (who now include the apparatus of the Republican Party) is not, however, confined merely in the noisome coils of racism. Just as potentially deadly are the provocations themselves. Empires, great powers, bullies, and insurgent cabals inveterately seek to instigate overreactions to be exploited as justifications for additional outrages, clampdowns, invasions, and assaults. No doubt some three-pieced trimp minion in the White House, dreaming of his own Reichstag Fire, is eagerly anticipating a meme of some overwrought ANTIFA abusing a Federal ICE official.
It’s time to brace ourselves while also steeping everyone with an open mind and a decent heart in the resources, traditions, power, and promise of non-violent resistance.
A.J. Muste, Gandhi M.L. King, and Gene Sharp are the names that should be on all our lips as their ideas guide our "best-laid" plans and hopes.
Some Resources:
Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns: second edition | War Resisters League
https://www.wri-irg.org/en/pubs/NonviolenceHandbook
All over the world, activists are taking nonviolent action for a more just, more peaceful world.
NVC Instruction Self-Guide | Center for Nonviolent Communication
https://www.cnvc.org/online-learning/nvc-instruction-guide/nvc-instruction-guide
A manual for a new era of direct action | Waging Nonviolence
https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/manual-new-era-direct-action/
[PDF] Everyday Rebellion Training_Manual.pdf by CA Miller
Strategic Nonviolent Struggle: A Training Manual discusses strategies for embarking on the path of peace by applying nonviolent approaches to resolving issues ...
[PDF]Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns
https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/.../wri_handbook_2014_inner_AMENDED.compre...War Resisters' International (WRI) is a network of mutual support, where we learn and support each other.
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