As speculation swirls around how bad a Trump regime will prove — which promises he’ll keep and which he will abandon — magical thinking delays a proper response to the very real deployment of fascist rule in America. “That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn or be forced to accept,” reads the original World Can’t Wait call to Drive Out the Bush Regime.
A recent statement published in Revolution newspaper warns “you [we] cannot try to ‘wait things out’ with fascists. Those who lived through Hitler’s Germany and sat on the sidelines, looking on as Hitler rounded up one group after another, became shameful collaborators with monstrous crimes against humanity. Trump and his regime must be resisted and defied, beginning now, in many different ways and in every corner of society.”
The president-elect campaigned to bring back torture; on waterboarding, he said, “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.” Trump’s selection of Jeff Sessions for Attorney General suggests he’s moving forward with delivery on that promise, sooner than later.
Reject Trump’s Cabinet of Horrors. Of all the taboos a civilized society takes for granted, Salonwriter Heather Digby Parton finds normalization of torture the most destructive. The candidates Trump has floated for national security and foreign policy jobs are universally open to some form of torture:
“Rudy Giuliani is enthusiastic about it, as is former U.N. ambassador John Bolton. Former congressman Pete Hoekstra, who is being considered as CIA director [Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo has subsequently claimed that ‘honor’], has said he thinks Congress and the administration could work it out. Trump’s newly named national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, has been noncommittal about his personal beliefs but said he thinks the president should be able to threaten torture and war crimes as a negotiating stance…
“We’ve been watching this slow-motion train wreck for a while. It just finally went off the rails.”
People living in Germany accepted Hitler at a horrific cost to humanity. Today, with nuclear weapons, that cost could be far higher. In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a Fascist America.