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Presidential Response to Nazi Violence

Howell Hurst Defining Trump, People Politics, Trump

FROM MY CORNER

Mr. Trump’s intellectual shallowness is palpable. Those supporting his superficial thinking are palpably shallow. Acquaintances of mine continue to support his irrational thought processes. This causes me to reevaluate them and any who are incapable of discerning the corrosive nature of his mind.

There comes a time when citizens must firmly decide what they believe in and unambiguously stand their ground. This current Neo-Nazi, White Supremacy rottenness is one of them.

The paramount question to be asked is: Who authorized in Charlottesville a group of organized Nazi lovers and Racist groups to hold such a march in the first place? It should never have happened.

Let us be clear: This is not a matter of freedom of speech. It is also not just about color, although there is no such freedom in America authorizing people claiming their alleged whiteness and rightness allows them to demonstrate their biases to others.

Their kind of thinking has already been demonstrated. It was demonstrated in Nazi Germany. In Fascist Italy. It is being demonstrated in Syria. It is being demonstrated by ISIS. It is being demonstrated in North Korea. It is an illegitimate concept.

Specific politically defined issues in each of these instances may differ. But, the comprehensive message being promoted by all of them is the same: They are saying they have the right to exact violence on all who oppose their rabid views.

This is not a gray area of thinking for anyone with a rational mind. Racially- motivated intellectual violence never deserves official authorization to demonstrate anew their rancid thinking. It ought never to have been allowed in Charlottesville.

It must be unequivocally condemned at the highest level as not only sharing in the violence that just erupted. It must be blamed as the cause of the violence. Anything less is nothing more than political ambiguity.

Anyone accepting the equivocal words of Mr. Trump as containing meaning is missing his unvoiced point. His is a reprehensibly conscious maneuver to protect his political base. There is no defense for such illiterate verbal irrelevancy.

His inability to cut to the core of the meaning of the message just delivered by a bunch of ignorant, crude, brutal people is not just a political public relations remark; it is proof of deep seated intellectual feebleness.

Responsibility for this violence does not need to be shared. It demands to be attributed to a specific frame of mind among a specific group of clearly identifiable people. It must be branded as utterly unacceptable.

A man asserting legitimate leadership of America who cannot or will not acknowledge this is incapable of being judged intellectually adequate to the position he holds.

When Mr. Trump was first elected, I said I would hold judgment on him until I had seen enough facts to make a decision. If he is unable to comprehend what is at stake in this issue – although he may legally hold his office, I see no other character traits remaining to justify his legitimacy.

He either condemns Naziism and Fascism or, by silent default, embraces it. There is no middle ground here. This is an ethical issue of intellectual attitude. It is bias that either lives in the mind of the man, or that he rejects. The same for his followers.

The question remains: Which is it?

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