Trump and terror, his xenophobia and his hawks

By Narciso Isa Conde

Narciso Isa Conde is a historic leader of the revolutionary movement in the Dominican Republic, who summarizes his article with this comment: “Terror reigns on a larger scale when the names and faces of Trump’s cabinet and those close to him come to light.” Translation: John Catalinotto.

Terrorism is not only material. It is not only applied to harm or destroy physically. It is also psychological; it includes strands that impact and condition people’s minds. There are rhetorical modalities aimed at putting fear and unleashing panic to crush freedom.

Remember: The fourth and fifth-generation wars include psychological wars mounted on powerful media mechanisms, traditional and non-traditional; these are supported analog and digital media that disseminate the very cruel repressive measures that the constituted power intends to execute inside and outside U.S. territory.

The [President-elect Donald] Trump forces have been building, within the framework of the crisis of decadence and decomposition of the U.S. empire, a project that incorporates psychological warfare into its arsenal; promoted by uncertain but aggressive steps aimed to stop the deterioration of the imperialist system of domination inside and outside the U.S.

In recent days, Trumpism — the U.S. version of neo-fascism — went from being a project to being a reality and an imminent threat by achieving the takeover of a large part of the State through votes it could manipulate.

The powerful leadership of this project succeeded in getting a majority of voters, filled with media images and unable to perceive the constructed trap, to accept the call for the devil.

But it has been well said that it is one thing to call for the devil and another thing when he arrives.

It is even different when, in the first phase, the other part of the society that sensed or perceived the political catastrophe in gestation manages to see it coming, about to rush upon society with all its cruelty.

Look, read carefully this sample of that impact, contained in this note sent to us from New York by a person very dear to our family. Please read it carefully:

“Hello. … Now I have a moment. What happened here is a predictable madness, but I failed to anticipate the torrent of emotions that it has unleashed in me. What hurts the most is what it means for the human species, for women and historically oppressed groups, especially as it relates to our greatest emergency among emergencies, the climate crisis.

“A colleague asked me how I was feeling, and I replied that I was grieving for humanity. I could use your perspective and that of our closest friends.

“All my Maroon spirit and blood says ‘Flee!’

“Does that sound alarmist to you — or realistic?

“I have lived almost all my adult life here, and I don’t think the conditions really exist for the massive mobilization in the streets that would be necessary, much less a Revolution.

“The so-called ‘good guys’ do not have the means or the necessary perspective, and the various factions are too disjointed, etc. Does it seem rash to you to be thinking of Costa Rica or Canada? I would be very grateful for your opinion. I am exhausted from being forced to teach while my students are crying and their panic is plain to see. It’s overwhelming.”

Such an initial reaction is understandable in the midst of so much fog and such grave dangers, when also on display are the faces of a cabinet of hawks with rockets on their shoulders and breathing fire from their mouths.

And behind this arrival there is also a “lumpen” [thuggish] financial, mining, armament and commercial bourgeoisie that contaminates everything.

That is no small thing.

I think, however, that step by step a large part of this society and of the world will be able to grasp that this phenomenon has nothing to do with the resurrection of strength lost by a system in crisis and clearly decadent, but rather with its deep weaknesses within a long agony that does not exclude these types of blows.

It is also very likely that later on, this truth will also be perceived by a wide swath of that society, which has been cunningly manipulated and mentally drugged by populism and the false ultranationalism of this new form of fascism.

In situations like this, the “flight” must be maroon [cimarrona in original], in order to fight death and fight better.

Terrorist measures, terrorist cabinet

Racism, xenophobia, machismo, anachronistic anti-communism, classist elitism and absolute disregard for the rights of Mother Earth, characteristic of the Trumpist option, certainly aim with much hatred, both in their outrageous rhetoric and in measures to be executed, against an important part of the most recent migrants and sectors of immigrants already established but without documentation; against Afro-descendant minorities and Indigenous peoples, in favor of white supremacy, against women’s rights and against the U.S.-based poor. And they target with great rage and marked ferocity.

They insist repeatedly:

On the immediate closing of the border, of a border that, in reality, has a wall far from being completed, a border with no way to close it. This can only mean applying a more cruel repression against the new flows of migrants from the South. 

It means deporting 11 million undocumented foreigners, which will collide with its high operating costs and with serious damage to agricultural production and public services, promising its relative failure. This indicates only a willingness to break Barack Obama’s record [of expulsions], raging against the most vulnerable.

It means repeating the ignominious determination to carry out deportations, even if it means dividing resident families, a decision typical of heartless beings; and even worse, it opens the possibility of deporting undocumented minors born in the U.S., a step already announced. It is serious to threaten to deport young people from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean who defend the rights of the Palestinian people (described as supporters of Hamas and the Palestinian resistance), in a country where a large part of the university youth condemned the genocide unleashed by Israel and the U.S.

This, more than an immigration policy, is political retaliation filled with cruelty and terror.

Furthermore, the implications of the dense and radical patriarchal-machistic, racist and homophobic rhetoric augur a spiral of violence greater than that already in place. Likewise, there is a growing tendency to stigmatize migration as a source of delinquency, as if the Calabrian, Sicilian, Jewish and Slavic mafias did not exist in the USA … as if the U.S. whites were vaccinated against the virus of delinquency and as if there were not considerably gangsterized capitalist groups on their territory.

The neo-fascists, to make matters worse, ignore the real causes of climate change, underestimate the ravages of destructive mining and the consequences of the overexploitation of natural resources, in order to continue expanding their productive cycles and their consumerist model; which is equivalent to accelerating the scouring on a planetary scale, to enhance the already evident prospects of the end of human and planetary life. 

They also propose to privatize on a larger scale education, health, water, nature and the state itself, all in favor of capitalist business and in disregard for the life of increasingly impoverished sectors.

There are plenty of reasons, then, to temporarily spread panic and overwhelm the part of society that fascistic populism has failed to alienate.

Terror reigns on a larger scale when the names and faces of Trump’s cabinet and those of his close aides and collaborators come to light.

Almost all of them are hawks [militarist and racist] and “hawks” of the worst kind … people of the noose and the dagger, with the criminal and arrogant tone of the Ku-Klux-Klan. …

They have the frightening “virtue” of saying what they think and how they would act. This also serves as an attempt to paralyze the necessary reaction, insubordination and rebellion, and to sow despair.

In line with this line of thought and action, figures such as Elon Musk and Marco Rubio stand out, but all the others are equally racist, xenophobic, ecocidal, pro-Zionist, anti-communist enemies of a multipolar and multicultural world – staunch enemies of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico. … It’s an entire political pathology, which only with great courage and intelligence can be confronted and defeated.

It is urgent to overcome hopelessness in order to defeat the culture of fear and death, something really possible.

The world has lived through similar moments, and humanity has won.

The Nazi-fascist troops killed tens of millions, reached Leningrad and Moscow and were defeated.

Finally, it is necessary to keep in mind that it is often true that when the night is about to dawn, it gets darker, until the sun rises.

Resist until you can go on the offensive

Certainly, the degrading impact of neo-conservative capitalism has opened the way for the ultraright and new forms of fascism, known as neo-fascism.

The reentry of Trump and his vice-president to the White House — under Elon Musk’s guardianship — opens spaces for the rise of the new right-wingers and the varied continental and global neo-fascist torrent, strongly impacting U.S. society.

Throughout the Democratic Party governments and in recent campaigns and voting, it has become clear that this political force [DP], which is the other side of the same fractured coin, is unable to contain the neo-fascism that springs from the systemic crisis of U.S. capitalism and its declining political model.

Rather, the Democratic Party is afflicted by the same pathology, and its ambiguous course of action gives an advantage to the more coherent, compacted and more blatantly sincere fascist version, led by Trump, Musk, Rubio and their ilk.

This explains the current reality of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party: one [RP] dominated by ultraright parties and factions that are openly neo-fascist and the other [DP] under the command of a leadership that pretends to be one thing while practicing another. They deploy similar policies in many aspects, under the control of the deep power and its ambitions to oppress.

Many people are weary of the pretensions and hypocrisies of the Democratic-Republican political establishment, but since they cannot find or are prevented from seeing an alternative path, they easily fall prey to neo-fascist populism or stay with the Democratic Party fakers.

But there are many who do not vote because they repudiate both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, and there are not few who, in the politically active bases of that society, sense the fascist danger.

In such circumstances it is suicidal to leave the field open to forms of fascism that affect so many exploited, overexploited, discriminated against and oppressed sectors.

Resist, unite, counterattack

Thus …

… if momentarily there is an ebb in the struggle, it is necessary to find ways to intensify resistance, even if they are small actions but have an impact, until it is possible to move on to bigger ones.

… if there is fragmentation, all efforts are worthwhile to combine the diverse groups that are under attack.

It is necessary to build collective consciousness that this neo-fascism is a political-social product of this phase of the capitalist-imperialist crisis, with varied modalities and combinations in its nourishing sources and versions of easy dissemination by different means.

And while the traditional media and digital platforms are under the control of the U.S. capitalist elites, the largest and most influential social networks favor, fundamentally, the set of ideas that nurture that way of thinking and acting. This is true in everything related to the exercise and dispute of power, in each of its aspects. This intensifies the alienating power of the media dictatorship, which has been operating under a prolonged mandate.

This makes it necessary for the popular counterpart, those with the will to transform and replace this unjust world order and its oppressive national and local expressions, to prepare to fight a set of transcendent battles for life itself, for the existence of humanity and for a planet in an environment of harmony and collective well-being.

These will be battles of ideas, battles of intelligence and creativity, street battles and much more. … 

Overcoming the various expressions of this ideological spawn, typical of a decadent and decomposing system, is a matter of life or death, of happiness and human dignity.

And this is no mission impossible, since it is very difficult for decadent Western imperialism, headed by a superpower in decline, to overcome such a wide and diverse range of peoples as the one that has not been subordinated to it … if passivity and dispersion are overcome and insubordination is strengthened with transforming demands.

There is no other way: It is necessary to resist until going on the offensive and creating the new, which does not fall from the sky, but from the deep knowledge of the current reality and the will and action to transform it.

The other choice is accept being a victim.

Although at times the possibilities of winning seem invisible, they are more real than ever before, only that all this goes through a long, difficult, hard and complex period loaded with lies and half-truths; and there is no other way but to challenge the adversities and embrace with strength the idea and the fight for a different world order, multipolar, multicultural, diverse and socially emancipated, just and in solidarity. (noticiassin.com, Nov. 15, 2024, Santo Domingo)

Translator note: Cimarrona or Maroon was the word used to describe enslaved people of the Caribbean who had escaped and were in hiding.