The Sniper Effect: Blood Is Their Argument

 

Through all the arguments about how to respond to Donald Trump and his merry band of thugs his opponents despaired about the ineffectiveness about the response to his brand of faux masculinity.

What do you say to the man who is not shamed by logic?

Trump had two kinds of defenders: rich and lower class. 

But in his rallies he had only one kind of supporter, the Sieg Heil mob member, who relished anonymous action, violence and mob solidarity.

It is said Trump has only one book at his bedside: Mein Kampf, where he learned his tactics of never admitting wrong, never accepting defeat, repeating any lie so often it began to acquire truthiness by simple repetition and keeping every statement as simple as possible from Hitler. 

Clearly, if you view documentaries about Hitler, the model is so clear it cannot be accidental. 

But what is forgotten is the role of simple murder: For murder, especially political murder, you need no gathering of evidence or shaping of sentences: you just pull the trigger or throw up the noose.

There was no out glamouring John F. Kennedy.  JFK's smooth humor and elegance could not be undone by any of his political opponents. But a bullet could bring him down and reduce all his arguments to dust.

Same for Martin Luther King: Nobody in the 20th century could approach his eloquence or the forcefulness of his rhetorhic or his power to move with words as he employed vivid imagery with cadence and rhythm. He was truly the rock star of mass communications in the 20th century, the only man who could do in front of a crowd what Hitler had done.

But Hitler's appeal depended on staging, the night rallies, the searchlights, the dramatic staging; King could do it with minimal props, he could do it standing on stone steps  with distracted members of the entourage looking elsewhere.

None of the haters could match that talent, not Strom Thurman, not George Wallace, not Lester Maddox. 

But a bullet could silence him.

And when the bullet speaks, there is no rebuttal and you know the argument is over and won by the gun.

Trump is not gone yet. Hitler went to jail and used his time well, and came back to strike when conditions were right, moving with audacity beyond the ossified Hindenberg and the fractured and fractious forces which opposed him. Taken together there were more Communists and workers/socialists than there were Nazis. But the Nazis were unified and violent and they murdered Rosa Luxemberg and anyone who stood in their way. Even other Nazis felt the blood argument: The night of the long knives consolidated Hitler as the leader of the Nazis and ended discussion about dissent.

I am so glad Obama survived his Presidency, although I still fear for him.

But, the fact is, he never scared the Trumpists. He was never that strong.

Now, we have to think about what we will do with that 14% which is violent and committed to Trump.

And we have to remember what country we come from: we have to look at those pictures of grinning men and boys and girls at the lynchings and remember the violent dark soul of this slave owning nation, a nation conceived in rage and nurtured by hate.