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| Trump Mob Storms Capitol Hill - Jan 2021 |
Independent Appeasers
By Mel Cooper
This morning
when I opened up my news feed there was a headline that caught my eye
immediately. It was: Impeaching Trump
Again is Unnecessary and Risks Further Dividing the US. This was the
editorial in the UK Independent newspaper.
My first reaction? Annoyance. Further reactions? Absolute fury and concern.
So, I
thought, here we are back in 1938 again and the thinking press of the UK is
advocating Appeasement; as PM Stanley Baldwin offered to Hitler – celebrating “Peace
In Our Time”. What this editorial headline says to me immediately, before even
having to read the crawling editorial itself, is that people are more worried
about the Storm Troopers and what they might say and do than they are about the
truth. Also, that the primacy of Justice is downgraded to make room for
crawling cowardice and self-serving short-term thinking.
Donald Trump
is a criminal. It is not as if his criminality and betrayal of his country are
hidden away or in any way ambiguous. Like a Mafia don, he tried to make the
Secretary of State of Georgia an offer he could not refuse - if he only found
an extra 12,000 or so votes somehow in the State of Georgia for Donald. He
should be impeached for that alone. And be fair to the Secretary of State. He politely
and diplomatically decided not to publish the recording of the phone call
unless and until the Donald attacked him; which, true to form, the President of
the United States did, thus compounding his crime of trying to vote-fix by
lying further when confronted with his own dangerous mendacity.
Meantime, the
Donald, Humpty Trumpty, was tweeting to his followers to come to Washington on
6 January, come by the millions, march on the Capitol and Stop the Steal!
(Interesting how Donald goes for 3 word slogans? Pity! Catchy! Distilled lies!)
He was actually asking his followers to interfere with the due process of the
election, which had already been declared in dozens and dozens of court cases
to be totally legal and correct.
“Stop the
Steal.”
Then we get Trump,
his son Trump Jnr, Giuliani, etc, addressing the crowd (not millions but 50,000
or so. Who counted?) and telling them
not to be cowards. Today is the day that we start fighting. Today we take back
control. Today we kick ass. Today you have to be a hero, or you will be a zero.
Today we take back the election that was stolen from us. (Wonder where they got
that slogan. Brexit perhaps: Take Back Control)
If after all
that we are supposed to look the other way, then we are in serious trouble. No,
it will NOT further divide a divided
nation. The Storm Troopers aren’t going to listen anyway. We should stop even
trying to convert them. And people with half a brain and some eyesight and
hearing are fully aware of what has been going on with the Donald all of his
life - more ramped-up since he started running for president. Piers Morgan is
saddened by how much the Donald has changed since he first was an admiring
friend. I have news for Piers Morgan. Donald Trump has not changed. He was
always like this. It was always an act and he always created the scripts that
he needed and then worked from them. And our very own Boris Johnson revered him
as a hero and a role model, so think about that too. (Not to mention the ass-licking,
brown-nosing, creepy snake known as Nigel Farage, the would-be German citizen.)
But to
suggest that we should not impeach this criminal, this proto-Fascist because it
will upset his followers and they might then do bad things, is more or less in
the same moral and intellectual camp as giving Hitler the Sudetenland, or insisting
that even if Dreyfus is innocent, he should stay on Devil’s Island because it
is more patriotic to uphold the good name of the army of France.
Once every
two or three generations a test comes along. And The Independent has just sat
the exam and has given very much the wrong answer. Indeed, it has got a D
minus. It has not failed completely. At least it recognizes in its answer that
wrongs have been done and the President of the United States is criminal. The
whole world has now seen his criminality in action in no uncertain terms. And
they are right to think that Trump’s Storm Troopers are dangerous.
All those
years he has not so much been lying as feeding his followers propaganda. Yes,
folks, he has been following the Goebbels Play Book, the Mussolini Martini mixer,
that poisons the mind, appeals to paranoia, provokes racism, and finds Another upon whom to blame all your woes
in this world that will then be fixed by your new Gawd, Hilter, Mussolini or
Franco or … Donald Trump. Our hero, our Gawd. It’s also called Brainwashing;
and the followers’ brains are totally cleansed of any aspect of inhibition
against violence, tolerance of any other viewpoint, tolerance of anyone who is
not White and created in their image.
As I have
said before, MAGA really means MAWA: Make America White Again. And they carry
guns!
But they are a minority. However large the
minority, it is still a minority. And among them are many people who would
waver, who would be able to wake up from the hypnotism that has been
perpetrated upon them; and who will not wake up unless they see people try to
do WHAT IS RIGHT! It will be tough; it may take time for the message to sink
in. But if Nancy Pelosi and the other Democrats and sane Republicans (the ten
who voted for impeachment) don’t invoke the law and do what they can to bring
Donald Trump and enablers and his cohorts of cultists to justice, if they are
not seen to try to apply justice, then that will be the ultimate betrayal and
also the ultimate stupidity. Because as with any form of appeasement, that will
just make the enemy stronger. They will see that they can get away with it and
they will then start trying to get away with even more.
It may indeed
provoke riots and violence if you impeach Trump. But that is the reaction of a
cult at bay, being defanged. Not to impeach Trump, not to sue him in all the
courts of the land for his various nefarious deeds over the year, is what will
empower the Storm Troopers. Anything to do with Trump is always going to be a
Lose-Lose situation. The brave thing is to choose the terms of the loss and be
ready to confront it. Not to impeach Trump is a reneging of duty. As our friend
Noel Hodson said, that is like saying you must not prosecute Jack the Ripper
because people will think you are infringing his human rights and his fellow
serial killers might get angry and riot.
So, I have
only one thing to say to the Independent: you should be ashamed of yourselves.
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