Rationalpolitik

Trump and the Language of Hate

How Trump's Language likens that of Classical Authoritarians

It makes sense to allege Donald J. Trump of equipping a language comparable to that of Adolf Hitler¹, especially since he has become more fond of likening his political opponents to vermin and the likes; he is only one tad away of calling them a disease begetting the American popular body² (Volkskörper), if he hasn't already--I don't keep up with his public iterations, online or offline. Overall, it is needless to say that his speech has become more dehumanising by the minute, after having become more ressentiment-laden during the Biden presidency³. We know that he has blamed incumbent POTUS Joe Biden for the two assassinations⁴ (and the one that was firstly suspected and contradicted later), as well as his VPOTUS Kamala Harris who he likes to call "comrade", although he has yet to prove either of the two implicit allegations: That Biden instigated assassination attempts against Trump--so far, he has only once made a remark that affiliated Trump to (semi-)Fascism⁵, and even that has been uttered years ago, while Trump usually refers to presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a Socialist, again totally unsubstantiated⁶. Altogether, if there is one candidate in the presidential race tainting the other with hateful language that had the potential to provoke violent actions, it would be Mr. Trump.

Reflections on the excerpt from Aleksei Nawalny's “Prison Diaries”

From the excerpt:

“Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck: Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.
"The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.” [1]

An Introduction to the Text

It has almost left the public mindset that President Trump has almost been assassinated during a campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania, but given the tremendousness of the event as a whole, I felt inclined to wonder whether what Thomas Matthew Crooks barely managed to do could be ethically justified. To many this question likens abhorrence and the terminality of a Liberal mindset, but once one begins to think sober about it, it comes close to an intriguing question, no less because there are so comparably many incidents of this kind took place in the relatively short history of the United States. Abraham Lincoln was shot in the Ford Theatre; William McKinley was shot at the World Fair in Buffalo, New York State. Before him, James Garfield was shot at a railroad station. Finally, Ronald Reagan was almost shot in broad daylight on a road. One could cynically remark that it must be an American tradition to shoot one's president down every couple of years.

How Israel's war against Hamas reinvigorates an inherent issue of online discourse

Once I have come across this article on the internet and read it, I must confess that I wasn't surprised since it was happening on Twitter, which has always been problematic even before Elon took over, but worsened rapidly after he took over. «The Washington Post»

But it's also symptomatic of a culture where paroles have trumped elaborate, fine-tuned arguments especially on thorny issues. What I mean is: Instead of detailing why they, for example, would support Palestinians despite their strong endorsement of the Hamas, the organisation whose rape, murder and pillage spree has triggered this all-out war, they will just share hashtags and paroles that you could easily repeat loud and wide on protests, and later wonder why the response to this is equally hateful and dispirited. As we would say in German: “So, wie man es in den Wald hineinruft, so kommt es auch wieder heraus”.

The Question of the Genocidal Conduct

THE AD HOMINEM

First of all, an ad-hominem argument I want to discuss early so that we can ignore it hereafter because ad-hominem arguments are fallacies for a reason. What usually comes into my mind is the fact that Ramaphosa had good reason to perhaps not bother with transnational conflicts not even tangentially relevant to a country like his. South Africa does not play a major role in any international alliance, so that there is no reason to push itself into the limelight. If he wanted to solve conflicts, he should sweep in front of his own doorstep, first of all. General poverty¹ frequently triggers violence on the streets, in the shape of robberies and thievery, the police cannot get hold of it². When his country passed the lawsuit, he announced it on his LinkedIn profile too, and the comments, particularly the top comment, spoke for themselves³. Those are not (just) boeren who fear to become targets of POC⁴, those are POC who fear that they could be begotten by their peers. So, in my opinion, as a side argument, Ramaphosa had enough conflicts to care about at the homefront, there is no need to move the points of interest abroad. One argument on why he does that are elections: Recently, he has announced that the general election will be held on May 09, 2024⁵, so this could be part of his re-election campaign, to stylise himself as a civil-rights activist in the fashion of Nelson Mandela, who is now placed up front with the quote that " our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians"⁶. The second part of the quote--that the same applied to Timor Leste--is of course crapped out because those people don't care about Timor Leste, the fewest could even tell where the country is even located⁷. But the more concerning, hypocritical point is that today's ANC is audacious enough to still call itself the party of Mandela, a misnomer comparable to the Trump GOP calling itself "the party of Lincoln"⁸. Also, if Nelson Mandela were still alive today, I think that while he were seriously concerned about the Palestinians' well-being, for which everyone had a reason, I think he were firstly more concerned about his own people, which made sense. Back in 1997, things looked brighter for South Africa. Nowadays, they are back at zero. Coming back to the speech that is so often cited (without context or source, to my great destitution), it should also be noted that he held then-Israeli president Yitzak Rabin in high regard for his contributions to the Oslo Agreements. For context: Rabin was later murdered by Zionists for those same contributions⁹. I cannot tell in what way this is relevant, but I thought that those who didn't know should know.