Thursday, March 2, 2017

A Dangerous VOICE

First, please watch the following very brief video from The Independent. (If you have trouble playing it, simply click on the above link):



The Star's Daniel Dale, our Canadian journalist expert on all things Trump, writes today that the creation of VOICE is an alarming escalation in the Trump war against immigrants.
Claudia Koonz, a historian at Duke University, wrote a book about how the Nazis prepared Germans to accept genocide.

One of their tactics was portraying average Jews, who were overwhelmingly law-abiding, as a menace to society. In the 1930s, for example, a Nazi newspaper published a weekly list of Jews’ alleged crimes.

In January, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered his government to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, who are overwhelmingly law-abiding, in most of the country’s biggest cities.

Trump’s order also established a government office solely dedicated to helping victims of crimes committed by undocumented people. On Tuesday, he promoted the office — VOICE, for Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement — in a prime-time address to Congress.
Even though crime statistics show that illegal immigrants are less likely to engage in crime than legal residents, both the inflammatory rhetoric favoured by Trump and the above decisions serve to effectively demonize 'the other' and essentially institutionalize the Orange Ogre's racism.

Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, says,
“The function of this program will be, one, to further scapegoat immigrants and portray them as deadly threats, and, two, to use the perception of threat to rally and rile the ‘base’ for political gain, relying now the power and prestige of the presidency."
And as reported by The independent, the publication of a weekly list of crimes by 'aliens' echoes a prominent feature of Breitbart News, which has a section called
"black crime" ... which publishe[s] a list of offences committed by African-Americans.
Given the increasing incidents of hate crimes, including what appears to be the racially-motivated shooting last week in Kansas, I think we can all see where this is going. The question is, are there enough people of goodwill, both inside and outside of politics, to fight this rapidly escalating madness?

7 comments:

  1. The only ones on the list should be The Twit and his 'team', they immigrated from reality and humanity some time ago and what they are doing is quite clearly a crime of epic proportion!

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  2. I recently watched a documentary on Netflix, Lorne, called "Hitler --a Career." The echoes in Hitler's rise and Trump's rise are deeply disturbing.

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    1. Those who choose to ignore history, especially when it comes to people like Trump, Owen, do so at everyone's peril.

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  3. As the Russian wrecking ball swings down on Trump, he'll probably react in true form by distractions such as this. I hope he's overtaken by his own scandals before he can cause too much damage.

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    1. Right now he is twisting under the Russian ties, Mound, as today's events amply illustrate.

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  4. Government under Trump has clearly become the enemy, not the protector, of the vulnerable, Pamela. And this is just the preliminary event, I suspect.

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