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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump and "his people" reach deep into the violent history of public spectacle in America.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/trump-rally.htmlThe Joy of Hatred
Trump and his people reach deep into the violent history of public spectacle in America.
By Jamelle Bouie
July 19, 2019
A Make America Great rally on Wednesday in Greenville, N.C., where supporters chanted Send her back about Representative Ilhan Omar. Tom Brenner for The New York Times
To watch raucous crowds of (mostly) white Americans unite in frenzied hatred of a black woman to watch them cast her as a cancer on the body politic and a threat to a racialized social order is to see the worst of our past play out in modern form.
To be clear, the Trump rally was not a lynch mob. But watching the interplay between leader and crowd, my mind immediately went to the mass spectacles of the lynching era. Theres simply no way to understand the energy of the event its hatred and its pleasures without looking to our history of communal racial violence and the ways in which Americans have used racial others, whether native-born or new arrivals, as scapegoats for their lost power, low status or nonexistent prosperity. And in that period, one event stands out: an 1893 lynching in Paris, Tex., where Henry Smith, a mentally disabled black teenager, was burned alive.
The 17-year-old Smith, generally considered a harmless, weak-minded fellow, according to Ida B. Wells-Barnett in The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, had been accused of the rape and murder of 3-year-old Myrtle Vance, thedaughter of the local sheriff. The white community of Paris believed the murder was retaliation for an earlier arrest by the sheriff, and the accusation of rape was added, in Wells-Barnetts words, to inflame the public mind so that nothing less than immediate and violent death would satisfy the populace.
On the day of the lynching, an estimated 10,000 people crowded along Pariss main street to witness the killing. Smith was bound to a float and paraded across town in a theatrical performance meant to emphasize his guilt. The audience jeered and chanted, cursed and gave the rebel yell. Fathers, men of social and business standing, took their children to teach them how to dispose of Negro criminals, a witness to the event said. Mothers were there, too, even women whose culture entitles them to be among the social and intellectual leaders of the town. Around noon, Smith was tortured, doused with kerosene and lit ablaze, immolated for the crowds enjoyment.
It was part carnival, part spectacle and part ritual. Smith was accused of something greater than a mere crime. He was accused of violating a sacred moral order of defiling the white home and white society. In the minds of many white southerners, the historian Amy Louise Wood writes in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 18901940, black men came to personify the moral corruption that they believed to be the root cause of social disorder. Lynching, then, acted as more than a form of political terror that restored white dominance against the threat of black equality. It also became a divinely sanctioned retribution for black sin that threatened not only white authority but white purity and virtue.
Library of Congress, via Getty Images
bdamomma
(63,849 posts)this is Steve Bannon's and Stephen Miller's dream, to sow so much discord into society bring everyone to their knees and rebuild it in their image.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/stephen-miller-trump-adviser/561317/
snip of article;
In the campy TV drama that is Donald Trumps Washington, Miller has carved out an enigmatic role. He lurks in the background for weeks at a time, only to emerge with crucial cameos in the most explosive episodes. The one where Trump signed a havoc-wreaking travel ban during his first week in office, unleashing global chaos and mass protests? Miller helped draft the executive order. The one where the federal government shut down over a high-stakes immigration standoff on Capitol Hill? Miller was accused of derailing the negotiations. (As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, were going nowhere, Senator Lindsey Graham grumbled.) To watch him in his most memorable scenestheatrically hurling accusations of cosmopolitan bias at a reporter; getting his mic cut in the middle of a belligerent Sunday-show appearanceis to be left mesmerized, wondering, Is this guy serious?
snip of article
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/the-strange-origins-of-steve-bannons-nationalist-fantasia
Bannons reading eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, an early-20th-century French occultist and metaphysician who was raised a Roman Catholic, practiced Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim who observed the Sharia. There are many forms of traditionalism in religion and philosophy. Guénon developed a philosophy often called Traditionalism (capital T), a form of anti-modernism with precise connotations. Guénon was a primordial Traditionalist, who believed that certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of common spiritual truths, revealed to mankind in the earliest age of the world, that were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West. What Guénon hoped for, he wrote in 1924, was to restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.
Guénon, like Bannon, was drawn to a sweeping, apocalyptic view of history that identified two events as marking the beginning of the spiritual decline of the West: the destruction of the Knights Templar in 1312 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Also like Bannon, Guénon was fascinated by the Hindu concept of cyclical time and believed that the West was passing through the fourth and final era, known as the Kali Yuga, a 6,000-year dark age when tradition is wholly forgotten.
NEOBuckeye
(2,781 posts)People who start raging fires often fall victim to them. Bannon and Miller are cunning by only a quarter.
Vogon_Glory
(9,117 posts)Seeing that fine old Anglo-American tradition resurrected for Donnie, Stephen, and Secretary De Vos would be highly gratifying.