Hail, Trump? Trump Gets Followers to Raise Right Hands and Swear Personal Allegiance

This is extremely ominous. Yesterday at a meeting in Orlando, Florida, Trump got his supporters to raise their right hands and swear their personal allegiance to him. This was reported in the Hill. Mike in his report on it notes the similarity to the oath every German citizen was required to swear to Adolf Hitler. The strangeness of the scene was also not lost on a columnist for Bloomberg. Mike states

The scene is reminiscent of Hitler in 1930s Germany – the crowd with their right hands raised echoing the Nazi salute, and the oath echoing the oaths of personal loyalty to the Nazi leader that Germans were ordered to swear.

Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis tweeted: “I’ve never seen someone swear allegiance to a politician in America, until today. To the Constitution, many times. To the flag, daily.”

See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/03/06/whats-worse-donald-trump-what-this-looks-like-or-what-it-really-is/

I don’t know, but I can kind of guess what Trump would say about this in his defence. He’d probably argue that it’s no different to raising your right hand to swear on oath in the church or in court. Many evangelical Christians raise their right hand during church services when they’re carried away with the worship. German evangelical Christians, obviously, very definitely do not. They raise both hands, just to make it very clear that they are not saluting the Fuehrer and the horror of the Third Reich.

But I don’t think the parallels with swearing oaths in court, or ecstatic gestures during Christian worship, really hold. It is far more like the mass oaths the citizens of the Fascist tyrannies were expected to swear to their dictators – to Hitler, Mussolini and the other goose-steppers. And Mike goes on to make the comment that its unacceptable either way whether or not Trump is ignorant of the historical comparison.

It’s frightening that Trump has the support of David Duke and the Klan, that he’s invited the White supremacist National Cesspool to his rallies; that he intends to deport 11-12 million illegal immigrants, build a wall with Mexico and ban Muslims from entering the US. Let alone his intention to resume torture and kill civilians in the War on Terror. Or is that the War for Terror?

Hitler claimed to be sent from God, and you can hear the same rhetoric around several of the Republican candidates. They claim that they are called by God, or their supporters claim that God has meant them to run for president. It all recalls the line in the oath to Adolf, ‘Oh my Fuehrer sent from God’. To their credit, the Jehovah’s Witnesses would not comply with these claims. They saw Hitler as a secular messiah, and so refused to swear loyalty to him. The only messiah for Christians is Jesus. And they paid for that with internment in the concentration camps.

The Wehrmacht at the Nuremberg Rally: Trump’s model for the Florida meeting?

Trump’s certainly Fascistic, but I don’t know whether he really is a Nazi. It could be that Trump is deliberately pushing the Far Right aspects of his campaign, both in style and substance, as far as they’ll go on the grounds that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. He’s getting talked about, and extensive media coverage. And the more sober media commenters or the Left note the similarities between him and the Fascists, the more popular he seems to become. He seems to be determined to push it as far as possible, until it rebounds.

Or until it’s too late. For America. For freedom. And for millions of innocents around the world.

A line from an old Space Opera I used to watch on TV comes to mind, a prediction given by a departing mage to a fiercely ambitious alien politicians: I see a hand reaching out of the stars. It is your hand. And I hear a billion voices calling your name.’
‘My followers?’
‘No. Your victims.’

Miley Cyrus Puts a Wrecking Ball into Trump

Mike over at Vox Political has put up a piece reporting that pop chanteuse Miley Cyrus has given her succinct opinion of the New York Nazi, Donald Trump. And it wasn’t approving. She described him as ‘a –ing nightmare’, and in the colourful demotic of contemporary rap, expressed her physical disgust and wish to leave the country.

Quite.

I realise that Cyrus isn’t exactly everyone’s musical cup of tea. She was Hannah Montana, but after growing up she decided to make her act much more raunchy, to the angry dismay of moralists, and the delight of Daily Mail journalists as they rushed to their keyboards to knock off stories about what an evil menace to western civilisation she is, and how twerking should be banned, with full pics so you can share the outrage too. But she’s done something cool here. And she’s right: Donald Trump is indeed a nightmare.

His racial attitudes are horrendous. His bigoted attitude towards Mexicans and Muslims is well known, as is his support for torture, even when it doesn’t work, and the targeting of civilians in the War on Terror, or whatever name they’re giving to the bloodbath in the Middle East. All of this is genuinely frightening enough. His alliance with the far right- he’s actually given press passes to a White supremacist radio show, The National Cesspool – could even pose a threat to pop culture.

Modern pop music, by and large, is pretty liberal. Part of the mainstream American right hates it because of its very frank embrace of sexuality, including homosexuality. The Moral Majority were most definitely not fans of David Bowie, because of the sexual ambivalence of his ‘Ziggy Stardust’ persona. Some of us can remember the 1980s when the Organisation of Senators’ Wives went chasing around demanding that the recording companies put stickers on the records stating that it had offensive lyrics. Just to protect good old American values, you know. The Reagan administration also inaugurate a series of congressional hearing in which various rockers and pop stars were hauled up before the nation’s elected representatives and interrogated about this new moral threat to America’s impressionable children.

They came a cropper when they got to Dee Snyder, the main man from Twisted Sister. They asked him about how he felt about exposing children to inappropriate material. Shouldn’t he be more careful about his band’s music? They actually didn’t know that Snyder was a responsible father himself, and said he was very careful indeed with what his children listened to. I’ve got the impression many rock stars are the same. Behind all the stage makeup and the bizarre performances, many of them in their private lives have exactly the same concerns about raising their children properly as the rest of society. Not all, by any means, but enough to take the wind out of some of those determined that rock is a genuine threat to western society’s moral fabric.

The Far Right also has ambivalent attitude to pop music. Of course, there is a Fascist music culture with the Nazi skinheads and the Eastern European Black Metal bands. On the other hand, there are also parts of the neo-Nazi milieu that bitterly hate pop and rock music because of its roots in Black culture. Modern rock ‘n’ roll started off as a mixture of White country music and Black barrel house jazz. Along the way it also drew on Blues music – it was due to the Chicago Blues style of Howlin’ Wolf that the guitar is the instrument of choice in contemporary pop music. Before then much Jazz was piano-based. Think Thelonious Monk tinkling the ivories, as well as, if I’m right about this, Professor Longhair. Gospel music has its origin in Black churches, while Punk after the initial fury passed was also influenced by Reggae. Let alone the influence of Ska, R’N’B, and so on.

Some of the White bands, who’ve been accused since of stealing the Blues, were originally real supporters and advocates of Black music. When they started out, the Rolling Stones covered songs by various Black American artists. The Stoned didn’t hide their musical debts – they told their audiences who the piece was really by, and the record label that had recorded it so they could hear it for themselves.

And some of the great Black performers were very proud of the fact that their music brought Black and White together. A little while ago Little Richard gave an interview into which he recalled the segregated nature of the dance halls in America. The Blacks tended to dance, while the Whites stood around the hall and watched. Richard, however, said that when he and his band came on, ‘the White spectators’ around the walls stopped spectating, and came and joined the Black folks on the dance floor. ‘And so’, he said, ‘Before Dr Luther King, we had integration’.

The racist right bitterly hates that interracial legacy and the tolerance that has been partly built up by Blacks, Whites and other ethnic groups, like Latinos creating a common musical culture. You can read rants by some of the American Nazi groups denouncing pop as ‘N*gger music’, and sneering at the people who like it, ‘dance like n*ggers’. It’s disgusting stuff, and it goes back a long way. The Nazis also objected to Jazz as ‘Negro’ music. By allying himself with White supremacists, Trump’s also given his support to people, who despise everything mainstream pop music stands for. Hence Miley Cyrus’ condemnation.