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| "Although Trump’s initial move in eliminating those he sees as Undermen is to make sure they are deported if their papers are not in order, we have already seen at Charlottesville that he condones white nationalist violence against anyone who disagrees with him." |
Denigrating people as less than human is a step
toward permitting their elimination.
by
In the beginning of the internet back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when you for the first time had large and contentious discussions online at bulletin boards like Usenet, attorney Mike Godwin noticed that the longer a discussion went on, the more likely it was that someone would make a Hitler comparison. Some internet aficionados even declared a thread over when someone evoked the National Socialists of the 1930s. The implication was that such a comparison was always hyperbolic.
The problem with Godwin’s law is that it emerged at a time when we did not expect to have a Neonazi president. Not being able to point to the real similarities of Trump’s White Nationalist discourse with Nazi premises about racial hierarchies would actually be dangerous at this point. And we have seen Mr. Trump defend self-avowed Neonazis and Klansmen at Charlottesville. It is not an optical illusion.
So yesterday Trump again called some undocumented migrants into the US“animals.” Calling people animals has been a parlor sport with Mr. Trump, and he has often gotten things wrong, as when he used his wealth to persecute the falsely accused Central Park 5.
Calling people “animals” is not just the use of an ugly epithet. It is not merely impolite.
It is a call to mistreat the class of people so designated, to fear them and blame them and ultimately to seek to wipe them out.
“Animal” functions similarly in this regard to the Nazi technical term “Untermensch” or underman, subhuman.
Please continue this article here: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/05/17/when-trump-calls-latinos-animals-should-we-hear-echoes-sss-undermen?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork
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