Spain in shock over van attack :
White racists, Southern separatists, praise US President :
American Nazi White supremacists threatening all non-Whites of the world with reminders of the original genocidal Nazism have been defended publicly by the President of the United States of America last week. President Donald Trump ended one of the most turbulent weeks in recent US history with a national media briefing at which he vehemently defended the fire and fury and deaths in a southern US city instigated largely by those Nazi and White supremacist activists.
Throughout the whole of last week the US President failed to take vigorous action or even make a sustained condemnation of the incident in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a local peace activist was killed in a murderous car ramming attack by White Nazi agitators. Instead of tamping down the shock and outrage against the Rightist violence, President Trump provoked further social enmity by equating the White supremacist agitators responsible for the violence with those local city activists who were protesting the racist agitation.
In no less than two national media briefings after the Charlottesville incident, Trump argued heatedly with attending journalists that the local city activists protesting the White supremacist and Nazi demonstration were as guilty for the violence as those Rightist gangs. Although he had earlier briefly condemned those Rightist groups by name, the President used a later, third, news briefing to reiterate his original views when, a day after the Charlottesville violence he issued a vague statement condemning “violence of many sides”.
On Friday, Augusst 11 th, Rightist White activists converged from all across the country on Charlottesville, famous as a centre of the secessionist ‘Confederate’ insurgency by southern US states in the mid-1860s known as the American Civil War. The Confederate states fought the Union armed forces in an attempt to secede and preserve their prosperous African slave-based economy then threatened by the abolishing of slavery by the US government.
The southern states lost the war and acceded to the ending of the slave economy, the culture of White supremacism remained among the white American population in these areas and even in the social system. Coloured-White racial segregation in residential areas, schools and other public facilities were maintained in some states till as recent as the 1950s.
The defeat of White supremacism seems never to have been fully acknowledged in the southern states and, by the early 20th century, various White supremacist movements were established to espouse and perpetuate race-based social segregation. The most famous was the Ku Klux Klan secretive movement, the members of whom only appeared in public covered fuly in white robes with a hood masking their heads.
Although later banned by law, even today many White supremacists would praise the KKK and adopt similar symbols and slogans. All these dangerously racist symbols were flaunted in flags and placards in the Friday demonstration and subsequent ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville on the 12th Saturday when severe clashes broke out between the Rightist activists and local protestors against this racist agitation. It was then that one Rightist agitator drove his car into the peace protestors killing one woman and injuring scores of others.
When Trump repeatedly described the peace activists – who included many local clergy – as “Leftists” and accused them of being equally responsible for the violence and deaths, he found that not only many of his own Republican Party legislators criticising him, but numerous big business leaders also deserting his side.
The President had to hurriedly disband two much-touted business leaders’ advisory councils after members of these councils began to resign in protest against their President’s public alignment with American Nazism, White supremacism and American Confederate secessionism. Readers are advised to check the Internet for articles describing the Charlottesville incident and the bizarre extreme Rightist movements involved.
The reaction to Trump’s seeming encouragement of Rightist extremism and racism has been profound. In an unprecedented move the heads of the three US armed services and the Marine Corp and National Guard have issued statements to their institutions and personnel cautioning the the existing strict rules pertaining to racism and Nazism in these institutions must be observed and would be sternly enforced.
In Europe, which suffered most from Nazism, national leaders have publicly criticised the US President. The UN Secretary General himself has issued a statement deploring the encouragement of racism and Nazism.
The Republican Party is now facing pressure from many sides to restrain their President’s controversial style of government and sudden jumps in policy and norms. Trump’s publicly expressed sentiments comparing Confederate separatist military commanders with the great Union leaders who defeated the slavery states is causing an uproar in the US. Would not there be a far bigger uproar if Sri Lanka’s President was to suddenly compare Velupillai Prabhakaran with D. S. Senanayaka or any other Independencce leader?
Opposition politicians in Washington are now openly calling for moves to restrain the President from further volatile behaviour that could worsen race relations in America. In fact a senior Republican Congressman last week questioned Trump’s competence to govern. News media commentators are even questioning his sanity given also his penchant for blatantly false claims and allegations.
Meanwhile, even as the US President seemingly defended the perpetrators of a car ramming and killing of civilians in the US, a suspected ‘Islamic State’ activist in Spain has driven his van through a tourist-crammed central street in Barcelona, Spain killing several people and injuring a large number.
Spanish police are still probing the incident which also seems linked to an explosion in a nearby town at a house believed to have been an IS bomb-making centre. Since at least three persons have been caught in this connection so far, the incidents clearly indicate that an IS cell had been operating in the region.
Anyone watching the international media’s portrayal of events in the US and Europe these days will seek travel advisories of risks if they think of travelling West. Having experienced successive insurgencies North and South in our own country, we are well aware of the conditions of internal war – urban and rural, mental and physical. Readers thinking of heading to those most attractive (if expensive) holiday destinations in the West will certainly want to either check destination conditions on the Internet and for any embassy advisories.
It will certainly be interesting to learn of current socio-cultural tensions experienced by those isolated Sri Lankan migrants living in the US South, away from the Lankan diaspora centres in Los Angeles and in New England. Such isolated Lankans, especially those living in what is regarded as the White Conservative dominated southern US states, are likely merging with the larger non-White communities that populate neighbourhoods often distinctly separate from White neighbourhoods.