Trump in Poland
Raising the Battle Flag of White Christian Fascism

July 8, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Picture the scene: July 6, Warsaw, the capital of Poland, a country ruled by an ultranationalist, ultra-religious, law-and-order party—i.e., a fascist party, “Law and Justice.” Thousands of Law and Justice supporters have been bused into the city to welcome their brother-fascist, Donald Trump. American flags are waving in people’s hands, and making absolutely clear what this is about, right in the middle, 5,000 miles from the American South, flies a big Confederate flag. That flag was a fitting symbol of what was to come.

This was a major speech by Trump celebrating the superiority of white, Christian people and culture (euphemistically referred to as “our Civilization” or “the West”) now and down through the centuries, and calling people to a holy war to defend it.

Trump declared “the West” is “the fastest and the greatest community. There is nothing like our community of nations. The world has never known anything like our community of nations. We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs ... and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God.”

As Trump exhorted the crowd: “[W]hat we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again.... [E]very foot of ground, and every last inch of civilization, is worth defending with your life.”

What Are the Actual “Values” of “the West”?

What has been most characteristic of “the West”? Symphonies??? No. To put it simply, the legacy of “our civilization” that Trump celebrates makes Game of Thrones look like the Woodstock festival of peace and love.

As early as the 15th century, and through the 19th century, colonial powers of the white, Christian “West” enslaved millions of Africans and sold them into generations in hell in the Western Hemisphere. In Peru, the Spanish reportedly worked eight million indigenous people to death in their silver mines. In Congo, Belgian colonialists routinely chopped off the hands of miners who failed to meet their daily quota. In India, the British took rebels against their rule and tied them across the mouths of cannons which they then fired. In the U.S., Australia, and Canada, genocidal wars virtually wiped out the Native populations. In the 20th century, wars over who would control the biggest empire, along with wars to control the colonized peoples, killed easily 100 million people. (Hitler, who led Germany in the most savage of these wars, was also quite fond of bragging about the marvelous symphonies that German musicians had created, and thus trying to depict Nazi savagery as somehow being in the interests of humanity!)

And they justified all this butchery, barbarism, and blood with the racist mantra of the “White Man’s Burden”—insisting as they murdered, raped, and plundered that they were doing those they slaughtered and enslaved a favor by bringing them the glories of “Western civilization.”

There is nothing in any of this that any decent human being should want to celebrate, much less violently defend. To the contrary, we should do everything we can to wrench society beyond the long dark night of oppressive class societies, and into a future that transcends wars and other crimes that have served exploiting classes and the domination of humanity by the imperialist powers Trump glorifies.

What Does Trump Mean by “the West” and by “Our Civilization”?

In truly Hitlerian tones, Trump railed, “[T]here are dire threats to our security and our way of life.” From whom? From enemies “from inside or out, from the South or the East.”

Journalist Peter Beinart points out that Trump used the terms “the West” and “our Civilization” a total of 15 times in his speech. And Beinart makes an important point: “The West is not a geographic term”—for example, Australia (in the South Pacific) is definitely part of “the West,” but Mexico and Haiti, definitely are not. Nor is Trump using it to describe countries which respect formal democratic rights like freedom of speech and the press. In fact, Trump himself is a vicious enemy of such rights, and Poland is now in the process of sharply curtailing freedom of the press, cracking down on the independent judiciary, etc.

No, what Trump means—and what his fascist supporters understand—is the nations of Europe, as well as settler states (like the U.S.) established by European colonists, that were historically either overwhelmingly white or were solidly white supremacist, and Christian (or Judeo-Christian).

In this clash of civilizations paradigm, and in a speech written by “white nationalists” (white Christian fascists) Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the existential threat “from inside and out,” from “the South or East” are the billions of people in nations ravaged by Western imperialism. And to the extent reactionary Islamic fundamentalist Jihad has taken root in some of those places—in the soil and environment created by imperialism—that and any other challenges to Western imperialism must be crushed “at any cost.” And, in this genocidal paradigm, because they undermine the white supremacist coherence of “the West,” Muslims must be banned from entering the U.S., Europe, and Australia, and treated as pariahs, demonized, terrorized, hunted down, and driven out of those countries. That, in the context of a horrific global refugee crisis that has driven 65 million human beings from their homes as a result of the economic, military, and environmental horrors produced by “the West.” How is this different than Hitler’s targeting the Jews, and where do you think this will lead?

We cannot here survey the whole deadly package for the fascist restructuring of societies in “the West” that flows from this genocidal clash of civilizations agenda, but we have to take particular note of something in that regard in Trump’s speech. He bragged that in “the West,” “We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success.” In the next sentence, he made clear what he means by this: “We put faith and family ... at the center of our lives.” This directly echoes the Nazi slogan “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“Children, Church, Kitchen”) as the way in which women are “pillars” of society. This is an extremely patriarchal view that does not see women as full human beings.

Speaking in Poland—a country with the most draconian prohibitions against abortion in “the West,” and where the rulers have forged a tight bond with Catholic fundamentalism—Trump said, “We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive.” (emphasis added)

A War Cry From a Nuclear-Armed Madman

Over and over in his speech, Trump invoked wars, in graphic and bloody detail. Invariably he wildly distorted the nature and context of those wars to contort them into the paradigm of the white Christian West fighting desperate battles of survival against existential threats from enemies of white Christian civilization. He wasn’t doing this to teach a fractured history lesson—he was doing it to forge a section of people to go along with, and fight and slaughter in, coming wars.

How else do you understand him demanding that people be willing to fight for “every foot of ground, and every last inch of civilization ... with your life”? Or, posing the question of whether “the West has the will to survive”?

And this from the mouth of the madman who asked a national security expert three times in one meeting: If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?

A Fascist Speech From a Fascist President Who Must Be STOPPED!

This speech should serve as a final, loud, obscene wake-up call: This regime is not just stupid and opportunistic. It is not impotent, unable to do any damage, unraveling and bound to go under soon.

No, this speech shows that the regime is thoroughly and coherently fascist, and that whatever bumps and detours it encounters, it is on the offensive, not only in the U.S. but internationally. This is a fascist regime, a product and extreme manifestation of capitalism-imperialism, and an imminent threat to humanity.

And this speech points, very sharply, to the need to seize the time, while things are still in a state of flux, to mobilize the millions and tens of millions who would hate to see a world like this, to take to the streets and stay in the streets until this regime is driven from power.

How Liberal Dan Rather, and Conservative David Brooks, Embraced a Fascist Speech

Trump’s speech was steeped in crude white supremacy and xenophobia, oozing with Christian fanaticism. Appropriately, fascist commentators loved it. Breitbart gushed that Trump is “protecting our borders” and “preserving Western Civilization.”

There were valuable exposures of Trump’s speech in “Trump’s alt-right Poland speech: Time to call his white nationalist rhetoric what it is...“ by Amanda Marcotte at Salon.com and in the piece “The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech” by Peter Beinhart in The Atlantic. But overall, mainstream liberal and conservative critics mainly embraced it.

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather tweeted: “President Trump pro-NATO speech in Poland is the best of his Presidency.” Rather’s embrace of a fascist speech, because Trump made some criticisms of Russia and—speaking to a crowd of Polish fascist-nationalists—promised to go to war against Russia if they attack Poland, is a salient warning to where making the terms of opposition to Trump being about him being “soft on Russia” can lead!

Conservative columnist David Brooks upheld the speech on NPR, welcoming Trump’s promotion of “Western Civilization,” while denying that singing the praises of the West was “exclusionary” towards people of other cultures and traditions. “I don’t think Western civilization is in clash with other civilizations.... But I happen to think we do have a civilization that, you know, you can draw it back to the Bible, to Plato, through the Enlightenment.... [I]t’s not exclusionary. It’s not necessarily hostile to other identities. It’s not hostile to other civilizations. But it’s a realization that you were formed as a part of a great tradition. And so I thought Trump’s speech was sort of part of that.”

Brooks does concede that “there could be an ugly side,” but he, Rather, and too many other commentators are evidently oblivious to what happened right in front of them. Trump was not—as Rather seemed to think—“standing up” to Russian authoritarianism and big power bullying. He was calling on Russia to stop making trouble in Europe and stop flirting with Islamic “enemies of civilization” in Iran and Syria, and join the U.S.-led West in its Crusade against Islam.

In “Marxism and the Enlightenment,” Bob Avakian (BA) speaks to the two sides of the Enlightenment, including:

Marxism agrees with that aspect of the Enlightenment that says that the world is knowable, that people should seek to understand the world (or reality generally) in all its complexity, and that they should do so by scientific methods. Now, there is a difference, a profound difference, between bourgeois scientific methods and the scientific method of dialectical and historical materialism, but it is a tenet and a basic premise of the Enlightenment that people should seek to understand the world by scientific methods, and this is a principal reason why the Enlightenment has been brought under attack-and today is once again being brought under attack-by religious obscurantists and other reactionary trends. That’s the aspect of the Enlightenment with which, in a general sense, Marxism agrees.

And he also emphasizes that, among other differences:

[O]f course, politically, the revolutionary proletariat opposes and represents a radical rupture with the system of bourgeois political rule which essentially corresponds to the Enlightenment. And, more particularly, we oppose the use of the Enlightenment, and the scientific and technological advances associated with it, as a way of effecting and justifying colonialism and imperialist domination, in the name of “the white man’s burden” or the alleged “civilizing mission” of the “more enlightened and advanced” imperialist system, and so on. This is another way in which we differ, profoundly, from at least important aspects of how the Enlightenment (and associated things) have been applied.

And in the section “Religious Fundamentalism, Imperialism and the ‘War on Terror’” in Away With All Gods!: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, BA speaks to one way in which this plays out in relation to the current conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and “the West”:

[I]mperialist conquest and exploitation, with all the consequences it has led to, including the installing and backing of corrupt and tyrannical “local governments” and the devastation of much of the way of life and the living conditions of the large majority of the population, has actually strengthened tendencies which identify ideas associated with “the West”—such as the progressive aspects of the Enlightenment, with its spur to critical thinking, its challenging of religious dogma, and its contribution to the separation of politics from official religion—as alien and antagonistic to the needs of the people.

Brook’s defense of a fascist speech reflects the dangerous and criminal place one ends up following “logic of the logic” of one-sidedly upholding the Enlightenment.

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