Sunday Reads: Hypocrisies of Dead White Soldiers
Posted: January 20, 2019 Filed under: Donald Trump, morning reads, open thread, racism, Republican politics, the GOP, white nationalists 44 Comments
The image above is from the town of Blue Ridge GA…as a White dead soldier is driven home…
Procession for fallen North Carolina Marine – Story | WAGA
USMC Sgt. Christopher J. Lockett died last week at a U.S. facility, but military officials have not yet offered more details.
Tuesday, his body was flown into Atlanta and driven in a solemn procession to Murphy. Hundreds lined Highway 515 in Fannin County, waving flags and showing their respect for the fallen hometown hero.
The people lining the streets are “tRump supporters,” in every sense of that description.
I do not want to diminish this man’s death, in any way, but I want to point out the hypocrisy…the difference in respect given this white soldier compared to other soldiers of color (killed in the line of duty)…as well as their gold star families.
Lest we forget:
The parents of Capt. Humayun Khan…
Donald Trump Criticizes Muslim Family of Slain U.S. Soldier, Drawing Ire – The New York Times
And the entire incident that occurred with the widow of U.S. Army Sergeant La David Johnson…
Trump Call Controversy Renews Spotlight On Gold Star Families : NPR
The widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, one of the four U.S. soldiers killed in a military operation in Niger earlier this month, says President Trump’s condolence call only made her feel worse.
I started to write this post for Wednesday…but decided to hold it for today. I don’t know why, but it would appear like fate:
The Stupidity of Evil: Teens Shouting ‘Build that Wall’ at Native American Vet
Some high school young men from a private Catholic school in Kentucky had been encouraged to attend an anti-abortion “March for Life” near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on Friday. Nearby, Native Americans were rallying for their rights.
Vietnam Vet Nathan Phillips saw a mean crowd of white teens in Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps harassing four African American young men. He was beating his drum and chanting, and came forward, drawing the attention of the young thugs, realizing the danger, he said.
They then mocked and taunted him, doing a bad sing-along of his chant, and then one of the teens, an unbearably smug look on his face, planted himself in Phillips’s way and trapped him in the ugly crown of Mean Boys. They were chanting “Build the Wall.”
[…]
Nathan Phillips gave a chilling interview about the incident to CNN, in which he expressed fear about where the United States is going. Remember, Phillips risked his life for a country that had treated his people like crap, stealing their land, putting them on reservations, forbidding them to practice their religion, and occasionally massacring them.
[…]
Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil, of the way in which boring routine bureaucracy had been deployed by the Nazis to commit unspeakable crimes against humanity.
What struck me from looking at those young men was that she could have perhaps even more usefully spoken of the stupidity of evil.
How stupid do you have to be to chant “build the wall” at a Native American whose people were here at least 13,000 years ago before the European undocumented migrants showed up in their lands?
How stupid do you have to be to chant “build the wall” at African-Americans whom white slavers kidnapped from their homes in Senegal and Nigeria and Angola and transported here against their will?
How stupid do you have to be as a Catholic not to know that anti-immigrant slogans like “Build the Wall” and “Make America Great Again” are the descendants of the racist slogans (such as “Keep America American”) that white Protestants of the 19th century ‘Know Nothing’ secret society chanted at Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Italy and Germany just before they burned down Catholic churches?
How stupid do you have to be to insist on a fetus’s right to life but to endanger the life of an elderly Vet by putting him into a bottleneck in the midst of an angry mob?
How stupid do you have to be to think that “Make America Great Again” could possibly mean anything when chanted by chickenhawk young men at a Vet who risked his life for this country?
How stupid do you have to be not to realize that the people Trump wants to keep out of the United States by building his idiotic, cruel and ineffective wall are for the most part Catholics?
Nathan Phillips said he is afraid for where the country of going because of the wave of hatefulness sweeping the country.
He is too polite to blame Trump for our collective national two minutes hate, but I’m not. This incident was Trump’s fault.
Mean boys in high school acting out evil may be a bit banal as well. But if Nathan Phillips is apparently afraid that hatred is contagious, I am afraid that stupidity might be an infectious disease.
The following are various tweets about this…another fucking disgusting episode in The tRump Chronicle of Shit.
This is an open thread….
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
grayslady
mablue2
Minkoff Minx
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Hard-hitting post, JJ. I keep wondering where were the adults who accompanied those racist teenage bullies.
This is an interesting long thread … the kid’s a freshman which means he’s very young and here’s about the culture of that school
Replies are interesting too … this is what’s really wrong about the way many young men–and particularly young white men–are educated and parented. I have no idea whose freaking dea it was to pack a bunch of young teens into a bus and take them to a Washington DC protest which is a place where protests are at a level beyond what these kids could deal with but that’s where the problem lies. When they piled off the stairs and started whooping and jumping there was no adult supervision. They also look like they’ve never been any where and instructed to leave people with other opinions alone and if they bother you then don’t join in or do anything. I have no idea why they weren’t taken to the state capitol or their city hall to protest but the adults in charge shoulda known better than to do this and should be the ones to blame soundly. I saw no supervision in any of these videos or any one telling them if heckled or approached, do nothing.
What a sweetheart!!!
No words.
No, I take that back. The immigrants should have been imprisoned and then deported as soon as they stepped on land. BTW, Ms. Guacamole, the original pioneers weren’t white.
okay, so now this is supposedly a fake account …. sheesh I can’t keep up wth it all
Well it’s gone now … I knew I should’ve snapped a pic of it. First, she made a comment about lying Indians and then there was her wish that the pioneers had brought more small pox infected blankets with them … I bet she can kiss her job goodbye with Fidelity
here it is before cleansed …
“After what I’ve been through in the past 36 hours, I only wish the pioneers had brought more blankets with smallpox. There, I said it. Crucify me.
— Julie Sandmann (@GauchoGuacamole) January 20, 2019”
They’ll have no choice in the matter. But I have been reading about that all-white private school just a shining example of everything a school shouldn’t be. The state needs to close that thing down.
And to be clear, she should be fired. Everyone has a right to their opinions and their hatred no matter how misguided but we have a right to ours as well and employers can’t have people like her representing their companies.
I completely disagree with that guy that the poor kid’s life would be ruined if his name came out and I told him so. Now that the name has come out, I’ve been proven right. Even supposedly lefty men on Twitter are buying his whiny statement and saying we owe him an apology.
Just imagine if this were a black kid with a gang of his friends. They’d be in jail or dead.
That “poor kid” was obviously smugly proud of his odious self, so let him shut up and take what he deserves.
I see people on facebook defending the actions of these kids. Not sure what is wrong with our fellow Americans.
Not another front-page article on the plight of the misunderstood Trump supporter, who is one of the people standing behind Trump during his speeches, laughing.
The blindness of white privilege and male privilege is astounding.
That guy does not get it. I wanted to comment on the WaPo article, but there’s no place to do so.
If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the article there’s a place for comments. There are a bunch of ads in between, so the comment section isn’t obvious at all.
What’s the link? I must have missed it.
Oh hell, I put the link in and then deleted the link when I edited my comment. Here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2019/01/19/feature/the-man-who-stood-behind-trump/?utm_term=.f7a7c85ed571
They were there watching.
Hi!! That’s what’s awful … they actually had chaperons who had know idea what they were doing!
:gobsmacked:
Although the whole March was about promoting reproductive slavery for women. With that mindset, maybe they don’t see much difference in hatefulness to yet one more group?
Women, American Indians, whatever. The entitled jerks feel hatred toward anyone other than themselves.
Meanwhile, they’re marching for LIFE, donchaknow. (There aren’t enough eyerolling emojis in the whole world for how I feel about those people. I wonder what it’s going to take for those braindead beliefs to disappear back into the bozone layer.)
My Senator:
I am so thoroughly disgusted at everything these days. Nothing surprises me. All I see is the continued fall into the authoritarian rule the likes of Hitler’s Germany. No one is stopping it.
I have hopes for the Democratic House. They’ve only had the majority for a couple of weeks yet.
The one hilarious thing here? Apparently they were a Black Jewish group.
Can’t even get her bigotries right.
They aren’t Jews. There are black Jews, but this is a different sect.
Oh, how to define religions! If they practice Judaism…. The first followers of Jesus were Jews, and it appears that (as far as we can tell from the historical record) whoever Jesus was he was indeed a Jew and was espousing a refinement of Judaism rather than a new religion. Reminds me that many Xians think Catholics aren’t Christian.
They don’t practice Judaism, according to what I read. Here’s some more info:
Thanks for the clarification, bb! I saw them mentioned as “Black Hebrews” and just assumed it meant black Jews. Live and learn. Sure sounds complicated, from what you and Luna are saying.
But definitely not the “Black Muslims” as claimed. She probably thinks all Blacks are Muslims. And that all Muslims are bad.
Whoever her gawd is, he (I’m sure it’s a ‘he’) must say “hate your neighbor.”
“Hate thy neighbor as thyself.” Sounds about right….
Next will be “So what if he told him to lie?”
says another prayer to the goddesses
Moon halfway shadowed now! Glorious, the sky is clear tonight with only light haze.
Just as well. He’d say something disgusting.
So he had Pence say it. Vile. Vile. Vile.