The Republicans, as anyone with three brain cells can see, go out of their way to demonize minorities of color, publicly, to garner the votes of the ignorant, the skinheads, the klanners, the faux Nazis, and the rest of the pathetic haters bubbling beneath the surface of America. One might note that the skinhead et alia vote isn’t all that big. But if you scratch the vast majority of right-wing Republicans you’ll find your basic klan hood and gown. Don’t let the manicured lawns and gated communities fool you like it’s fooled them into thinking they’re decent people. The Republican base is peering out from behind the curtains, looking for unwhite, unchristian, unamericans who dare walk Republican streets.
The Republican Southern Strategy, playing on white race hatred that resented Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights initiatives, is no secret, and it worked well to grease them into office and keep them there while everyone pretended they weren’t engaging in foul racist politics. Every once in a while their cover would slip, as it did when Trent Lott spoke at that now infamous birthday party. Yes, he paid a minor price, but nothing changed.
Now the Republicans are beating the same drum of bigotry and hatred, though they’ll couch it in the usual terms of ‘securing our borders’ and ‘protecting our economy and workers’. But the beat is the same. Them versus us. They’re less than human. They’re a disease in America. Yada yada yada. Same old crap.
And their junkyard pundits on the radio, less constrained than Republican politicians like Romney and Tancredo and the others, take up the cry in full throat, baying at the moon of insane racism and hatred, encouraged by the words of the Republican leadership.
And the result? Here’s a list for your perusal.
How long before Republicans open the camps and bring further disgrace and shame on this country? Do you really want to know? Just vote them in next year. It won’t take all that long. They’ve already put us on the road. It used to be the Jews, but it’s too hard to attack them now. They learned how to defend themselves. Wanna bet the Jew baiters of today don’t know crap about the Jewish partisans in World War II? Now it’s the poor from anywhere, but mostly Latinos, who bear the brunt of race hatred.
As you read down the list of beatings and rapes and murders of Latinos, you might ask yourself how many of those who beat and raped and murdered those Latinos would or could do the hard work most Latinos in this country do, whether here illegally or legally. Go out in the fields where your vegetables are being picked in backbreaking labor and you won’t find any skinheads or klanners or Nazis or white Republican suburbanites or any of the other morons and dittoheads who are spreading the hatred. You won’t find them working twelve hours a day doing landscaping at Mitt Romney’s mansion, or anywhere else. You won’t find them on roofing crews, or building houses, or doing manual labor, day after day, month after month, year after year. Latinos do a goodly part of the work that keeps this country together economically.
And Republicans are doing the best they can to ride the sweat and blood of those people into power, no matter how many they have to get beaten and killed. It’s the way people like that have always done business. Find out who has no voice, no power, no recourse, and blame them for all the problems. Turn your supporters against them. Ride the wave of hate into power.
That was the way in Rwanda. That’s the way in Darfur. That’s the way it was in Nazi Germany and in Stalin’s Russia. It’s an old way, much revered in this world by those hungry for power, by those who care nothing for people, but instead care only for their arrogant egos, for domination over others, for pillage and rape and loot.
And now, pathetically, sadly, and all too predictably, it’s becoming the way in America.